"I'll send you one of my girls." Margaret's glance at Charles devilled him. "I have one who can work about three months before she has to go to a lying-in hospital, and she's just weak-minded enough to make a good domestic."
"I can't," said Catherine, "haul in a stranger from an agency to leave here all day."
"Well, then," Margaret was briskly matter of fact, "there's just one thing to do. Give up this foolish notion of a career, and step into Flora's empty place."
Charles made a little leap at that idea, and then sank away from it, with a faint suggestion in his mouth of a disappointed fish watching a baited hook yanked out of reach.
"Or," went on Margaret gravely, "Charles can stay at home. So much of your work could be done here anyway, Charles. One eye on the stew and the other on some learned tome."
"Why not?" Amy's tense question knocked the drollery out of the picture. "Why wouldn't that be possible? After all, Mrs. Hammond, you have spent years doing that very thing."
"The King would burn the stew, of course." Margaret rose, sending a light curtsey toward Charles. "Come along, Amy. If we're to walk home. Why don't you ask Sam, if that's the elevator boy's name, if he hasn't a lady friend out of work? That's what we do."
When Catherine returned from the door, her eyes crinkled at the sight of Charles sunk behind the pages of his evening paper.
"Poor old thing!" she said. "Did they rumple his fur the wrong way?"