“Why, what has become of them?”
“They fled at the very first mention of the trouble. Never was anything accomplished more rapidly. I thought they had hardly time to reach their rooms when they disappeared around the corner.”
“Is it possible!” Susan said, after a moment’s silent contemplation. She was both surprised and disappointed. There was nothing in her nature that could respond to that method of bearing one another’s burdens, and she did not understand human nature well enough to expect developments in others which were foreign to her own.
“What shall we do about dinner?” Ruth asked, after another interval of silence.
“Why, get it,” Susan answered, lightly. She could not comprehend what an impossible thing this was in Ruth’s estimation.
“But I—why, I know nothing about it,” Ruth said, stammering and aghast.
“I do. There is nothing about a dinner that I do not understand, I believe—that is, a reasonable and respectable dinner. In fact, I know how to do several things that are unreasonable. I’ll go right down-stairs and take a view of the situation.”
“I will go with you,” Ruth said, heroically. “I don’t know anything about such matters, but I can at least show you through the house.”
Is it your fortune to know, by experience, just what a deserted look a kitchen can take on in a brief space of time, when the regular inhabitants thereof have made a sudden exit? Just let the fire in the range go down, with unswept ashes littering the hearth, and unwashed dishes filling the tables, and a general smell of departed cookery pervading the air, and you need no better picture of dismalness. Especially is this the case if you survey the scene as Ruth did, without being able to conceive how it was possible ever again to bring order out of this confusion.
“Why, dear me!” said Susan, “things look as though they had stirred them up to the best of their abilities before they left. Where is the hearth-brush kept, Ruth?”