“It’s the wrong time, of course,” said Zelda. “I’m always coming at the wrong time.”
“It’s always the right time,” declared Olive. “But you’ll have to excuse me for a few minutes. This is Thanksgiving Day and my headquarters are in the kitchen. There’s a new magazine or two—help yourself.”
“I’m not using your house as a free reading-room. I dodged church, so I could come and see you. Let me come out and talk. I like your clothes,”—and she put aside her wraps, surveying Olive admiringly.
“Come on, then. I’m making bread,”—and Olive led the way to the kitchen.
“She’s making bread, after all the glory of her début! It’s just like the interviews with great artists that we read in the newspapers. They’re always planting garden-seed or canning fruit, when the reporter calls.”
“If I were you, I shouldn’t refer to last night, after the trick you played on me. You carried it all off with such a rush! I don’t know yet how I came to let you do it.”
“You shouldn’t talk that way to your poor sick cousin. My throat is still very painful,”—and Zelda put up her hand and coughed desperately.
“That will do, thank you! You can’t stay in the kitchen unless you’ll be good.”
Olive’s kitchen was, as she said herself, the best room in the house. Her own paint brush had made it white, and table, range, draining boards were up to date. It was a model kitchen, according to Olive’s own ideas, which were so attractive that shortly after her return from college she had written them down in a series of articles for a paper devoted to the interests of women. Pretty things do not cost any more than ugly ones, she held; and there was no reason why the piano should not be kept in the kitchen, if its owner could use it there to the best advantage.
“I hate to give up a single thing,” Olive had declared to Zelda, “except blacking the stove. I’d like to draw the line there.”