"A letter for you, ma'am," said the handmaiden, as she laid the missive on the deal kitchen table, near to the lady's elbow.
It was an ordinary-sized letter, not over clean, and it had two or three broad post-marks on it; and on the top, at one corner, was written, in a bold hand, "Ship Letter."
"It must be for your master; you had better take it to the study, Jane," said Mrs. T., barely glancing at it as it lay.
"No, ma'am, there's the 's' plain enough; and Austin said it was for you."
"Well, you may leave it where it is. I'll see about it presently, when I've rolled out the pie-crust and wiped my hands. I can't do two things at once, can I?"
"No, nor yet one, properly," muttered Jane to herself, with a look of contempt mingled with pity, for Jane liked and despised her mistress in about equal proportions. She liked her; for her mistress was good-natured, and liberal in the matter of wages, and also of cast-off clothes, of which, by the way, she obtained a plentiful store when Sarah went into mourning for her mother. And, added to these causes of approbation, the mistress let the maid have her own way in general, and never scolded her. But these very qualities provoked June's contempt also.
"She is such a noodle," said Jane, inwardly.
At this present time, Mrs. Tincroft had rather annoyed the girl by "putting her dainty hands into the flour tub, where they had no business to be," Jane would have argued.
No wonder, therefore, that when the lady said, rather fretfully, that she could not do two things at one time, the damsel inwardly retorted, "No, nor yet one, properly. Call that a pie-crust? Who is going to eat it, I wonder?"
Of course this was pure envy in Jane; for who doesn't know that Sarah had made good pie crusts in former times? John knew it, at any rate.