"If it had been after dinner I would have hit you," and the delighted officer shook his fat sides and patted his bay window with its row of gleaming buttons, showing he understood Mr. Tucker's joke. "There are two classes of persons I always keep in with—policemen and cooks. You can get into no very serious trouble when you have them on your side," Zebedee had laughed gaily.
"I've got a job! I've got a job!" cried Dum, almost breathless with haste and excitement as she rushed into the room where Dee and I waited.
"What is it?"
"Selling household novelties, of course. I'm to report at eight in the morning. I was the third girl to get in to see the boss. You never saw such a pompadoured, gum-chewing crowd in your life. I felt so ladylike I hardly knew myself. The boss was sure some household novelty himself. He is fat and soft, looks powerful like a dough ball, wears button shoes and an embroidered vest, curly black hair done up in a roach and stewed prune eyes and a full set, upstairs and down, of false teeth that look like
"'Thirty white horses on a red hill,
Now they dance, now they prance,
Now they stand still.'"
"But, Dum, what on earth are household novelties?" I gasped.
"And how much are you to get?" demanded Dee.
"One at a time! There is a whole bunch of novelties: one is a little plug to keep windows from rattling; another a needle-threader; another a silver polish; another a spot-knocker; a patent batty-cake turner that makes the batty-cake do the flipflap by pressing a button—either for cakes or omelettes; then there's Mrs. Rand——"
"No, not really!"
Mrs. Rand was a miscellaneous implement we had taken to boarding-school that had been purchased from a street fakir and we had named for the landlady at Willoughby Beach, who had been very irate over the Tuckers having lost the one she had in the cottage they rented from her. It was a combination apple-corer, can-opener, cheese-grater, potato-parer, and what not. It was the kind of thing you could use for everything but the things it was intended for. It was a great screw-driver and tack hammer and invaluable to gouge things out of deep cracks.