As Andy passed through his own hall between his own umbrella-stand and eight-day clock on his way to pay a parochial call, he stepped lightly, less like the proud incumbent of an excellent country living than a schoolboy who endeavours to escape a maiden aunt.
But it was no use. Before he reached the porch a door was opened, and Mrs. Jebb, the housekeeper, fluttered forth from the back regions. She had previously fluttered in and out of matrimony in rather the same way, and seemed to have brought nothing from it but a wedding ring and a black satin dress trimmed with beads.
She had, however, brought something hidden as well—a profound conviction that she was fascinating to the gentlemen. Her late husband had been wont to remark, during their brief married life, that there was a something in her way of looking out of her eye-corners that was enough to upset an aconite. He meant a rather different thing, but he was not as cultured as Mrs. Jebb would have liked him to be. Still the habit of—as she inwardly phrased it—“eye-cornering” clung to her still.
Andy’s aunt chose her solely because she and sex seemed to have no connection—which is only another proof that nobody knows anything at all about anybody else—and she called herself a lady-cook-housekeeper.
She “eye-cornered” Andy now as she came flitting after him to the front door, but more for the sake of practice than from any ulterior motive.
“Might I ask you—you do pass the grocer’s shop—and we are out of soft sugar?” She had a way of talking in gasps until she got fairly started, when nothing would stop her. “I am so sorry to make mistakes, but I must ask you to try and remember that I never expected to serve even in the—er—higher reaches of domestic—when Mr. Jebb——”
“Excuse me,” said Andy, seizing his hat from the peg, “I am rather pressed for——”
“And a pound of rice, if you would be so very kind?”
“Delighted. Of course,” said Andy incoherently, escaping down the steps.
He had already learned that the reminiscences of life with Mr. Jebb were so long and varied that it seemed strange a year could have held them all, and of so intimate and pathetic a nature that, once fairly started, it were sheer brutality to cut them short.