“He might at least have refurnished it, mightn’t he?” said Emily, with a laugh. It was not a pleasant laugh.
“What would you like for dinner?” she asked Alexina, her hand on the bell.
“I don’t care,” said Alexina; “anything.”
“So it doesn’t cost too much,” said Emily, laughing the laugh that was not pleasant.
Later, the conferences with the servants over, she sat down to make certain entries in the ledger, open on the desk. Alexina picked up a magazine.
“He asked me one day,” said Emily, turning, “what had become of an end of roast that ought to have come back made over, and said there must be waste in the kitchen.”
“Don’t,” said Alexina. “I wouldn’t, Emily.”
“Why not? You knew it all before.”
Alexina flushed. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I did. I knew it—before. How are your mother and the little girls, Emily?”
“Mother—oh, all right. He told me to ask Nan and Nell over every Friday from school to supper, and mother and father and Oliver over to Sunday night tea. ‘It ought, in the end,’ he told me, ‘to make an appreciable saving in your mother’s providing, these continued absences from stated meals.’”