“Oh, she’s turned up to polish it, poor woman, has she?” he said, with an air of relief. “I told her she could. It’s all right.”
Mrs. Jebb fluttered forward, wavering a little like a butterfly that has imbibed too much nectar, and she alighted with one trembling hand upon the writing-table edge.
“It is not all right,” she said. “It is all very, very wrong, Mr. Deane. Poor, I am, reduced to domestic service, I may be—but I will retire to the workhouse before I will allow a female from outside to polish furniture in this house while I remain your lady-cook-housekeeper.”
“Really, Mrs. Jebb—I’m sure I never——” began Andy.
“What will the parish say?” went on Mrs. Jebb, growing still more agitated as she saw Andy’s concerned face. “What will the world say? Naturally that I’m not fit to be your housekeeper, if Mrs. Simpson has to come with dusters and furniture polish and an—an infant, to clean the Vicar’s dining-room sideboard.”
A dragging sound as of something being pulled reluctantly along, a bump, a yell, and Mrs. Simpson’s voice in the rear, shrill with motherly indignation.
“How dare you call this dear child names?” she cried, replying to the limitless opprobrium which lay behind the word ‘infant’ rather than to the term itself.
“Come, come,” said Andy, rising. “He is an infant all right, aren’t you, Jimmy? Not twenty-one yet, ha-ha! There is nothing unpleasant in the word ‘infant.’ ”
He smiled ingratiatingly from one angry face to the other, trying to carry it off easily, but in truth as frightened as a decent young man always is when he stands between two quarrelling women.
“There’s a way,” replied Mrs. Simpson slowly, glaring with her prominent light-blue eyes at Mrs. Jebb—“there’s a way of saying ‘woman’ that implies things I wouldn’t sully my lips by uttering. And yet ‘woman’ isn’t a bad word.”