“It may seem simple to you. But who’s going to cut off their heads?”
“Sophy,” said Baldy. Having killed Germans in France he refused further slaughter.
“Sophy has the rheumatism——”
“Oh, well, we can feast our souls——” Young Baldwin’s mood was one of exaltation.
Jane leaned back in her chair and looked at him. “Your perfectly poetic solution may satisfy you, but it won’t feed the Follettes.”
With some irritation, therefore, he promised, if all else failed, to himself decapitate the fowls. “But your mind, Jane, never soars above food——”
Jane, with her chin in her hands, considered this. “A woman,” she said, “who keeps house for a poet—must anchor herself to—something. Perhaps I’m like a captive balloon—if you cut the cable, I’ll shoot straight up to the skies——”
She liked that thought of herself, and smiled over it, after Baldy had left her. She wondered if the cable would ever be cut. If the captive balloon would ever soar.
So she went about her simple tasks, putting the bone on to boil for soup, preparing the vegetables for it—wondering what she would have for dessert—with all his scorn of domestic details, Baldy was apt to be fastidious about his sweets—and coming finally to her sweeping and dusting in the front part of the house.
The telephone rang and she answered it. Evans was at the other end of the wire.