“First separate, then beat!” he repeated. “The author of that cook book must have had a mean disposition. What’s next? Hang them?” He looked up at me with his boyish smile.
“Separate and beat,” I repeated. If I lost a word of that recipe I was gone. It was like saying the alphabet; I had to go to the beginning every time mentally.
“Well,” he reflected, “you can’t beat an egg, no matter how cruel you may be, unless you break it first.” He picked up an egg and looked at it. “Separate!” he reflected. “Ah—the white from the—whatever you cooking experts call it—the yellow part.”
“Exactly!” I exclaimed, light breaking on me. “Of course. I KNEW you would find it out.” Then back to the recipe—“beat until well mixed; then fold in the whites.”
“Fold?” he questioned. “It looks pretty thin to fold, doesn’t it? I—upon my word, I never heard of folding an egg. Are you—but of course you know. Please come and show me how.”
“Just fold them in,” I said desperately. “It isn’t difficult.” And because I was so transparent a fraud and knew he must find me out then, I said something about butter, and went into the pantry. That’s the trouble with a lie; somebody asks you to tell one as a favor to somebody else, and the first thing you know, you are having to tell a thousand, and trying to remember the ones you have told so you won’t contradict yourself, and the very person you have tried to help turns on you and reproaches you for being untruthful! I leaned my elbows despondently on the shelf of the kitchen pantry, with the feet of a guard visible through the high window over my head, and waited for Mr. Harbison to come in and demand that I fold a raw egg, and discover that I didn’t know anything about cooking, and was just as useless as all the others.
He came. He held the bowl out to me and waved a fork in triumph.
“I have solved it,” he said. “Or, rather, Flannigan and I have solved it. The mixture awaits the magic touch of the cook.”
I honestly thought I could do the rest. It was only to be put in a pan and browned, and then in the oven three minutes. And I did it properly, but for two things: I should have greased the pan (but this was the book’s fault; it didn’t say) and I should have lighted the oven. The latter, however, was Mr. Harbison’s fault as much as mine, and I had wit enough to lay it to absent-mindedness on the part of both of us.
After that, Aunt Selina or no Aunt Selina, we decided to have boiled eggs, and Mr. Harbison knew how to cook them. He put them in the tea kettle and then went to look at the furnace. And Officer Timothy Flannigan ground the coffee and gave his opinion of the board of health in no stinted terms. As for me, I burned my fingers and the toast, and felt myself growing hot and cold, for I was going to be found out as soon as Flannigan grasped the situation.