“Nice little place you've got here,” he observed. “I think I see the fine hand of Miss Edith, eh?”
“Yes,” said Willy Cameron, gravely.
He had made renewed efforts to get a servant after that, but the invalid herself balked him. When he found an applicant Mrs. Boyd would sit, very much the grande dame, and question her, although she always ended by sending her away.
“She looked like the sort that would be running out at nights,” she would say. Or: “She wouldn't take telling, and I know the way you like your things, Willy. I could see by looking at her that she couldn't cook at all.”
She cherished the delusion that he was improving and gaining flesh under her ministrations, and there was a sort of jealousy in her care for him. She wanted to yield to no one the right to sit proudly behind one of her heavy, tasteless pies, and say:
“Now I made this for you, Willy, because I know country boys like pies. Just see if that crust isn't nice.”
“You don't mean to say you made it!”
“I certainly did.” And to please her he would clear his plate. He rather ran to digestive tablets those days, and Edith, surprising him with one at the kitchen sink one evening, accused him roundly of hypocrisy.
“I don't know why you stay anyhow,” she said, staring into the yard where Jinx was burying a bone in the heliotrope bed. “The food's awful. I'm used to it, but you're not.”
“You don't eat anything, Edith.”