"Fish?"
"A figure of speech, my dear."
And it set Mrs. Wrandall to thinking.
CHAPTER IX — HAWKRIGHT's MODEL
Brandon Booth took a small cottage on the upper road, half way between the village and the home of Sara Wrandall, and not far from the abhorred "back gate" that swung in the teeth of her connections by marriage. He set up his establishment in half a day and, being settled, betook himself off to dine with Sara and Hetty. All his household cares, like the world, rested snugly on the shoulders of an Atlas named Pat, than whom there was no more faithful servitor in all the earth, nor in the heavens, for that matter, if we are to accept his own estimate of himself. In any event, he was a treasure. Booth's house was always in order. Try as he would, he couldn't get it out of order. Pat's wife saw to that. She was the cook, housekeeper, steward, seamstress, nurse and everything else except the laundress, and she would have been that if Booth hadn't put his foot down on it. He was rather finicky about his bosoms, it seems—and his cuffs, as well.
Pat and Mary had been in the Booth family since the flood, so to speak. As far back as Brandon could remember, the quaint Irishman had been the same wrinkled, nut-brown, merry-eyed comedian that he was to-day, and Mary the same serene, blarneying wife of the man. They were not a day older than they were in the beginning. He used to wonder if Methuselah knew them. When he set up bachelor quarters for himself in New York, his mother bestowed these priceless domestic treasures upon him. They journeyed up from Philadelphia and complacently took charge of his destinies; no matter which way they led or how diversified they may have been in conception, Brandon's destinies always came safely around the circle to the starting point with Pat and Mary atop of them, as chipper as you please and none the worse for erosion.
They stoutly maintained that one never gets too old to learn, a conclusion that Brandon sometimes resented.
He had been obliged to discharge three chauffeurs because Pat did not get on well with them, and he had found it quite impossible to keep a dog for the simple reason that Mary insisted on keeping a cat—a most unamiable, belligerent cat at that. He would have made home a hell for any well-connected dog.