“Sigma!” a loud, clear voice was calling from the region of the stairs. “Sigma,” and again, “Sigma! Have you set the table? Sigma-a-a!”
Nathaniel Mar wrote on.
The door opened suddenly and in came a brisk, rather handsome, dark-eyed woman, with an infant on her arm. Singularly enough the child seemed to be as little interrupted in its occupation of sleeping as the father in his writing. There were certain sounds that both were inured to. Among others, Mrs. Mar calling “Sigma,” or “Kate,” or “Jane.” But when she stopped short near the threshold and asked:
“Where is that girl?” Mar, without raising his eyes from his paper, made a little motion toward the door he had just shut.
“I should think,” he said, quietly, “she was probably breaking up the kitchen stove.”
Before he finished, Mrs. Mar had opened the other door, and again called “Sigma!”
“Yes—yes.” In rushed a little white-headed Swede, fourteen to fifteen years of age, her sleeves tucked up, her coarse gown tucked up, her fair skin showing vividly a sooty mark across her forehead, which she had smudged down her nose and finely shaded off into the red of her cheek.
When Sigma was calm and collected she walked the floor as if it were knee-deep in sand. When she was agitated she did not walk at all. She plunged. Sigma was agitated now.
“Coom!” she said, lifting a bare elbow toward the kitchen as another person might point with a finger. “Coom!” and turning heavily she was about to plunge back into her special domain.
But Mrs. Mar arrested her. “Why haven’t you set the table? Look at the time.” She pointed.