“What would Mother do?” called Margaret from her lady's bower.
It was so obvious, even to me, that Mother would not have been up a tree at this hour that I could only repeat my original project of abandoning the slipper. I learned afterwards that it is not an entirely uncomplicated process to buckle in the centre when swinging in a tree-top with one foot stationary and a tin pail on one's arm, and untie a slipper-strap without tipping the pail or falling out of the tree. Margaret soon appeared within my line of vision, listing dangerously, chastened, dignified, and stocking-footed. She reminded me simultaneously, as she descended, of a mystic Russian première danseuse, a barefooted native swinging down his cocoanut grove, and High Diddle Dumpling my son John.
I was rash enough later to inquire into the mechanics of retrieving the slipper, but Margaret, as she finished her tart, replied so appropriately in the words of the Scriptures as to be too sacrilegious to repeat.
As our nonchalant day wore on, I lighted the gas-oven for popovers. Popovers are casuals. They are not supposed to be a chef d'œuvre. They are the high-grade moron of the hot-bread family. A guest expects the popovers to be good, just as he expects the butter to be good. I expected mine to be good.
As they neared the crisis, the city gas was shut off. I acted instantly, treating the phenomenon as a rare exception in housekeeping. I aroused a dying fire in the coal range with great speed and an abundance of kindling, and conveyed my gems across kitchen. It is a sweet-tempered popover, indeed, which will bear shifting from a hot oven to a moderately comfortable one. I began steadily to lose my unconcern. Once on my knees before an oven door, I usually ask no quarter and receive no advice. Advice is sometimes given me, but my advisers realize that it is not being received. This time I called Margaret in consultation.
“I think they are going to pop,” she pronounced judicially, “but not over.” She was right.
Does Life hold, I wonder, a more sorrowful moment than that time when a true cook has to instruct her guest to scoop out the inside of her popover for the chickens, and eat only the outside? Every one knows that delicate tinkling sound that a good popover makes when tossed on a china plate. These made somewhat the same sound as a Florida orange. We learned quite cogently that evening that Hospitality may depend, not upon greatness of heart, but upon the gas stove.
This experience of ours, however, could not be regarded strictly as a test case. Any one would admit that all of our adversity was unusual. It is the rare exception when all the pipes in the house burst at once, when there is no gas in the gas-stove, and when one loses a slipper in making a cherry pie.
It took another day to show us that running a house normally consists in dealing with a succession of unusual events.
We did not court disaster, or attempt anything ambitious. We had not even planned to invite any more company. But an old friend of Geoffrey's appeared at our door in uniform with his new wife, to wait over a train. Margaret promptly invited them to lunch. Our lunch, as already planned, was simple. We told them that it would be simple. Margaret leans, during hot weather, to such things as iced tea, lettuces, cheese wafers, and simple frozen desserts. Fiction has it that the water-ices are the simplest of anything. They are simple to eat. We had planned to freeze the water-ice together. But in view of the fact that we had company, Margaret, who had first suggested our simple dessert, slipped quietly out to freeze it alone.