On her knees upon the floor, Helen Forester was laboriously dissecting a large cold fowl. Her only weapon was a penknife, backed by brute force.
“This is a horrible job!” she observed to the company at large, raising a flushed countenance. “I should like to wipe my heated brow, only my hands are too greasy. Nita, you’re great on physiology—do come and tell me where this animal’s joints are.”
“Get his side-fixings off,” counselled Nita, coming to her assistance. “You hold one leg and wing firmly, and I’ll hold the others, and we’ll pull. Something’s sure to come apart!”
Something did. Nita surveyed the dismembered bird with satisfaction.
“There!” she said. “That’s much simpler. Now you just go ahead and dig in here and there till you weaken the general resistance of the creature, and I’ll get the leg-joints apart.”
“It sounds simple, but when you come to reality you need an axe!” said Helen. “I suppose if one scrapes the bones until there’s nothing left on them one needn’t bother about getting inside?”
“Indeed, there’s the stuffing—or should be,” said Nita, wrestling gallantly with the leg-joint. At which Helen groaned, and fell to work anew with her inadequate weapon.
“Father would shudder at the carving, but there’s nothing wrong with the result,” she remarked placidly, sometime later. “After all, every one seems to have got some, and I believe that it really needs a genius to feed twelve people off one fowl!”
“Few could do it,” agreed Nita. “No one is sufficiently grateful to us, of course, but——”
There was a chorus of dissent.