“Have you nothing at all in the house?” poor Mrs. Conway says. “Is there nowhere near you could send for anything? My little girls are quite hungry.”
The woman seems to find it hard to understand how it comes about that they are hungry and wandering about on such a day; they are well-dressed, and very warmly wrapped up. But when the mother begs her again to do her best to get them a meal, she consents reluctantly.
“You’ll have to take the back room,” she says, “the gents have engaged the front one.”
“We don’t mind if it’s the kitchen,” says Dolly joyously, “do we, Phyl?”
They are led into a room full of small oil-clothed tables, with a common-looking cruet, a jug of water, and a glass bowl filled with lumps of sugar in the centre of each. The children try the tables one after the other, and finally seat themselves at a round one that holds a dirty menu-card.
In the interval during which the woman goes very reluctantly to “do her best,” they study this card, and speculate as to what the “best” will be.
“If they have three soups, roast beef, curry and veal pie, custard-pudding and fritters, on common days,” says Phyl, “surely they can find something nice when it’s Christmas Day.”
[123]
]“But the woman says she has nothing at all in her pantry,” the mother says.
“She said she’d send to the butcher’s by the back door,” contends Dolly.
“But what could she get there to cook quickly?” says the mother; “you wouldn’t like to wait for a joint of beef to be cooked, would you? I am greatly afraid it will be nothing better than chops.”