The two young men had cleared the table by removing the dishes and débris indiscriminately and depositing them upon the table in the back kitchen.
When Temperance returned from a little chat with Nathan beside the smoke house, she eyed the chaos upon the table wrathfully.
“Laws!” she said. “Of all the messes! Lanty Lansing, ain’t you ashamed to be so redecklus? And them girls standin’ gawkin’ and laughin’! As for you,” eyeing Sidney severely, “I should ha’ thought you’d more sense, but blessed is them that has no expectations! Lanty! Are you or are you not feedin’ that brute with good roast? Where’s the cold meat fer supper to come from, I’d like to know?”
No one volunteered a response till suddenly Sally piped forth in her thin reedy voice:
“Take no heed for the morrow what ye shall eat, or——”
“You blasphemous brat!” said Temperance, her wrath diverted to another channel.
Sally subsided into silent contemplation of the dish of pickled beets from which she was helping herself with pink-stained fingers. Temperance was not Mrs. Didymus, and Sally in many combats in Blueberry Alley had learned to gauge her antagonists.
The offended Miss Tribbey left the back kitchen in indignant silence and set about arranging the table for her own and the girls’ dinner, murmuring to herself meanwhile a monologue of which such words as “messes,” “sinful,” “waste,” and “want o’ sense,” were distinctly audible.
“I don’t believe that was really an unqualified success,” said Sidney to Lanty.