“Getting it out, dear?” said the younger Miss Solbé.
“The spades are Wicked to-night,” said the Miss Solbé with the glasses.
“Mine is going rather well,” said the daughter of the gentleman with the whiskers.
“Does your daughter play Miss Milligan?” asked the younger Solbé sister.
“Eight-eights,” said the comfortable wife. “Miss Milligan is too much for her.”
“Well, it is a Beast you know,” said the stepdaughter. “You never know where you are with it.”
“Patience is Patience,” said the elder Miss Solbé. “Nowadays I often get it out. But not when the spades come as they’ve done to-night, both twos in the top row, and no aces till the last round but one.”
Christina Alberta thought it was time to change from the Sketch to the Tatler. She tried to do this with careless ease and flopped a dozen papers on the floor. “Oh, Damn!” said Christina Alberta to a great stillness. She struggled to pick up and replace the disordered sheets. For a time every one seemed to be regarding her. Then Mrs. Bone took up her discourse again.
“And you can’t imagine their obstinacy,” she said. “They are wilfully ignorant. When you show them, then they won’t do it. I took my cook-boy in hand for a time—boy I call him, but he was quite a middle-aged man—and I said to him, ‘just let me show you some plain English cookery, a boiled fowl with nice white sauce, a few plain potatoes and vegetables—quite plain with the natural flavour left in—the sort of food that builds up these brave young Englishmen you see.’ Of course I’m not a good cook myself, but anyhow I knew more of English cooking than he did. But we never got further than the plain boiled fowl. He expressed the most violent disapproval—really violent I mean—of the whole proceedings. As I took hold of the things and got to work he began to behave in the most extraordinary way. He tried not to follow what I was doing. Tried not to. He said that if he cooked a fowl like that he would lose caste, lose his position in the local guild of cooks, be perpetually defiled and outcast. Why, he would not say. When I persisted he rushed up and down pulling at his black hair—a black madman, his eyes rolling frightfully. I could never make out what there was in a plain boiled fowl to cause such excitement. ‘This in my kitchen,’ he said. ‘This in my kitchen!’
“There I stood quietly boiling my fowl while all this pother went on. He hovered about me. He talked—fortunately in his own language. I even caught him pretending to be sick behind my back. Then he came and implored me to desist—with tears in his great brown eyes. He tried to say things in English. The Major always says that he was simply swearing, but I believe the wretched man really did believe that if he was to boil a fowl in the plain, wholesome, simple way nice people in England do it daily, he would be hung in the air, and the great jays of Burmah would come and peck—ahem!”