“No, that picture of you that I did last winter. She is crazy—she says she is going upstairs and sit in Takahiro’s room and take smallpox and die.”
“Fiddlesticks!” I said rudely, and somebody hammered on the door and opened it.
“Pardon me for disturbing you,” Bella said, in her best dear-me-I’m-glad-I-knocked manner. “But—Flannigan says the dinner has not come.”
“Good Lord!” Jim exclaimed. “I forgot to order the confounded dinner!”
It was eight o’clock by that time, and as it took an hour at least after telephoning the order, everybody looked blank when they heard. The entire family, except Mr. Harbison, who had not appeared again, escorted Jim to the telephone and hung around hungrily, suggesting new dishes every minute. And then—he couldn’t raise Central. It was fifteen minutes before we gave up, and stood staring at one another despairingly.
“Call out of a window, and get one of those infernal reporters to do something useful for once,” Max suggested. But he was indignantly hushed. We would have starved first. Jim was peering into the transmitter and knocking the receiver against his hand, like a watch that had stopped. But nothing happened. Flannigan reported a box of breakfast food, two lemons, and a pineapple cheese, a combination that didn’t seem to lend itself to anything.
We went back to the dining room from sheer force of habit and sat around the table and looked at the lemonade Flannigan had made. Anne WOULD talk about the salad her last cook had concocted, and Max told about a little town in Connecticut where the restaurant keeper smokes a corn-cob pipe while he cooks the most luscious fried clams in America. And Aunt Selina related that in her family they had a recipe for chicken smothered in cream. And then we sipped the weak lemonade and nibbled at the cheese.
“To change this gridiron martyrdom,” Dallas said finally, “where’s Harbison? Still looking for his watch?”
“Watch!” Everybody said it in a different tone.
“Sure,” he responded. “Says his watch was taken last night from the studio. Better get him down to take a squint at the telephone. Likely he can fix it.”