"Yes, miss?" She wiped her greasy hands on a torn apron, and stood there, expectant.
"What's all this about the chicken? Lizzie tells me it hasn't come?"
"No, miss." She leaned against the table, massive, inert, with an over-red face. Her person exhaled a faint smell of brandy and the glazed eyes completed the story.
"Then what are we going to have for dinner?"
"I'm sure I don't know, miss."
Jill gave her one look and passed with a quick stride into the larder. Thrown anyhow on the dingy shelves were scraps of fish, butter and suet, jars of dripping, some shrivelled apples and the scraggy remains of a leg of mutton. The closed-in place smelled of cheese and mice. Jill explored with hopeless disgust. Too well she knew the domestic chaos that balanced her mother's political activity.
For Mrs. Uniacke had no time for "home." She scorned the narrow "sheltered life" and wore out her strength in that daily fight to prove that Woman was fitted to rule.
"This mutton now..." Jill tipped the bone onto a clean plate from its close companionship with a raw herring, and came back, still frowning, into the kitchen.
"You could grill it, couldn't you?" she asked sharply.
The cook, stupidly, turned it over.