“You’ll ruin your figure and your digestion by eating between meals, Auntie Sue,” Maude had said. “Promise me you won’t!”
Miss Carter had refused to promise, but she had said that she would try, and she did try. She turned her back upon this temptation, with a faint sigh, and gave a last glance round the kitchen.
Nothing more for her to do here! It was as spotless as a chemist’s laboratory. Indeed, that was what Maude wanted it to be like. She said that a kitchen ought to be a home laboratory, and she wanted it all white and bleak and stern.
Even a high white stool had been provided for Miss Carter. She found it very convenient for many purposes, but she did like a rocking-chair, and she had apologetically brought one down from the attic. To please Maude she had painted it white, so that it also had a somewhat severe look; but when there was nobody else in the house, Miss Carter always got out that nice, downy old red silk cushion from the hall cupboard, put it into the chair, and sat down and rocked comfortably while she shelled peas or hulled berries, and so on.
The cushion always disappeared before Maude got home, because it would distress her. If she were to see it, she would surely go out the very next day and buy a scientific, up-to-date one—perhaps one like those hard, shiny things that dentists have in their chairs.
Maude disapproved of old, soft, comfortable things, and called them “slipshod.” She hated all that was not exact and efficient. It was misery for her to hear Miss Carter talk about putting in “a pinch” of cinnamon, instead of one-eighth of a teaspoonful, and the mention of “a lump of butter the size of an egg” appalled her.
She had bought Miss Carter glass measuring cups, quart measures, pint measures, scales, and sets of spoons of all sizes; and yet, in the making of these very doughnuts, Miss Carter had used that old blue teacup for measuring, and she had put in many “pinches” of things. It made her feel guilty to think of it, but she really couldn’t help it. At forty—
Now there was another treacherous thought! Maude never allowed her to be forty.
“Never think of yourself as forty,” Maude often said, “and you won’t feel forty.”
But in her secret heart Miss Carter wished that she could just comfortably be forty. It seemed to her a remarkably nice age to be. Indeed, she felt proud of it. When she went to buy a hat, and the saleswoman said something nice about her splendid head of hair, Miss Carter liked to say: