He did so and it was promptly answered by a woman servant.
“Fetch Miss Dorothy,” she said.
She had risen in her agitation regarding her son’s shocking hunger and began pottering about the room, frowning, lifting up little articles from the bureau and the table with trembling old hands. It was a fine, big room with a Turkish rug on the floor and an assemblage of solid walnut furniture. It was crowded with knickknacks, photographs, a hundred and one mementoes of her past life. It hadn’t the look of a bedroom, for the bureau was hidden behind a screen and the bed was a folding one, displaying nothing but an immense bevelled mirror set in a broad frame of polished wood. Her son had never, even in childhood, seen the least trace of disorder in this room.
“Pshaw!” said the old lady, “she’s asleep again, I suppose. The older she grows the lazier she gets. She’s forever creeping upstairs and going to sleep.... All nonsense.... Here am I so troubled with insomnia that I don’t get five hours rest out of the night and I don’t think anyone’s even seen me taking a nap.... Well, Dorothy!”
A woman stood smiling in the doorway, a stout, grey-haired woman with a tousled, guilty air, a cousin, who earned her bitter bread as a companion for various relatives. She was always spoken of as staying with Aunt This and Cousin That; after two or three months she was sent away, with a sort of rage engendered by her submission, her poverty and her stupidness, and then when the memory had worn off, she was recalled. Her usefulness was never admitted, but always exploited.
“Why, Gilbert!” she said, with an air of pleased surprise. “I didn’t hear you come in!”
“I don’t think you’d hear a sound if the house was on fire!” said the old lady, tartly. “It’s dangerous, the way you sleep. We could all be murdered in our beds, and it wouldn’t disturb you.”
“Why, Cousin Selina, I wasn’t asleep! I was writing letters!”
“Well, now perhaps you’ll be able to attend to this poor boy. He hasn’t had any dinner. And I’d calculated on his having a hearty meal there, so I hadn’t planned for a very big supper. And Katie’s out. Run down to the kitchen and see if you and Mary can’t fix up something nice for him. And tell Mary supper at five instead of six.”
Miss Dorothy looked terrified. She knew so well the very meagre resources of this household where there was never quite enough of anything, where each egg was mentally numbered.