Jethro was pleased and invigorated by her reckless dogmatic opinions, by her dainty domestic ways. He used to watch her graceful figure flit from room to room, used to listen to her high young voice giving peremptory orders. She fascinated him. She was always changing, and the women to whom he had been accustomed all his life never changed. Each one said and did exactly what her mother had said and done before her: to be original was to break the fifth commandment.
They sat round the great open hearth on wet, wild evenings. Gainah would be sewing or painfully writing out recipes in a dirty copy-book. Pamela generally had a catalogue of bulbs, a sheet of paper, and a pencil. Nancy’s gushing, incapable enthusiasm, and Mrs. Clutton’s practical knowledge of flower gardening had infected her. She already knew them well enough for that. She was full of ideas for spring bedding.
“I must have a hundred early tulips,” she would say coaxingly.
When Jethro, looking up from the local paper, returned indulgently, “Order what you please,” she added the hundred tulips to her list with the glee of a child.
Gainah seldom said anything. She had always been a silent woman, and Pamela’s whirling, modern influence had petrified her altogether. The thin white lips hardly opened except to timidly rate the two maids, who now tossed their heads at their former tyrant. She took Pamela’s presence passively, never commenting on anything she did. But sometimes, when the girl looked up suddenly from the fascinating bulb catalogue, and found those odd eyes on her, she shivered. They were so dead—those eyes. Yet such a secret, such a terrible soul seemed to play and lurk behind them.
Gainah never protested. Little by little she felt the scepter slip from her powerless hand. Little by little her life lost color. Pamela laughed at her methods, was often disgusted by her thrifty, traditional economies. She had a superior trick of saying, “My way is the correct one.” Or she would quote the domestic routine of her father’s house, in the prosperous time when they lived in a detached house with a carriage drive and stabling. She was more than a bit of snob, but Jethro knew nothing of snobbery. He approved of all she did.
She gabbled on hygiene. She took tickets for a course of lectures on domestic economy, driving into Liddleshorn every alternate Friday. When she returned, she was more ardent than ever for reform. She penetrated to the scullery, and examined the dishcloth—with a scared murmur of microbes, because it had not been scalded in soda water and hung up in the air to dry. She insisted on making the tea herself in a patent pot. Once she said lightly that Gainah was trying to poison them all because she told the cook to boil halfpence with the cabbage to make it green. The flash in Gainah’s eye had been sinister, but Pamela did not see it. She laughed Jethro out of his favorite supper—a loaf hot from the oven and soaked in cider. She tried very hard to abolish supper as a meal—wishing to call the eight-o’clock meal dinner. But here she was stopped by the opposition of every member of the family; even Aunt Sophy entered a diplomatic protest.
She begged Jethro to make Chalcraft wring the necks of the poultry. She couldn’t bear the slow sounds of death. It was barbarous—the slight, skillful slit of the knife, the long bleeding, the fluttering “glug-glug” in the throat, growing fainter and fainter. Gainah had always insisted on that method; she said it made the flesh white. Gainah shut the doomed birds for twenty-four hours before death in a coop, and made them fast, so that they might be more easily got ready for table: Pamela went surreptitiously to the corn sack, and gave them an extra feed before the ordeal. Gainah, in hot weather, hung meat down the well to keep it fresh; she buried sour milk in the earth, tied up in a muslin bag, and dug it up cream cheese. She had a theory about leg of mutton: it should be buried in the earth for three days to make it tender; the same might be done with an old hen. She did not approve of eggs in a milk pudding, and never used butter in white sauce if the milk was new and not skimmed. To waste nothing, to be lavish with nothing—that had been her religion. The hygiene lecturer—through Pamela, who conscientiously took notes—told her that some of her antique tricks were not only dirty, but dangerous.
Pamela taught the cook to make bread without touching it with the hand. She told Boyce how to milk the cows, washing his hands in an antiseptic first. She had chemical tests for the milk, and made a rigorous inspection of the dairy each morning. Gainah was calmly put aside as a domestic fossil. She was openly flouted. She was told to sit by the fire, to do nothing. Even needlework was not necessary—things could be bought so cheaply ready-made, ready-marked even.
She was pushed aside. She must do nothing. Yet for over thirty years she had done everything. Her life had been one long fury of immaculate housekeeping according to her lights. She had thrown all the fierce energy of a naturally passionate woman into her dairy and her store-room. Love had just brushed her, then slipped away; maternity had never been hers. Religion she regarded as a respectable duty, varied by the clergyman coming to tea, which was a nervous trial, and meant getting out the best china. She couldn’t write poems, or lecture, or be an athlete; every outlet of the emotional woman was denied her by circumstance or temperament. She had flung herself upon the altar of good management, and now she was told that good management was not an art—it was the merest detail in the day’s work of a truly capable woman.