Mrs. Tayloe shivered at intervals, hysterically. She caught her breath at every other word.
"Comfort! They are a part of my torment. He will manage them to suit himself. Do you know that he whipped my little Lizzie when she was only a month old for crying with the colic? She was the oldest, you know, and her father said he couldn't begin discipline too early. He whipped her with a willow switch. My mother told him he was a brute, and he turned her out of the house—the house my father gave me!
"Set that down on the table here, Hampton, and you, Ned, tell Mr. David Grigsby that the snack is ready."
"He never eats between meals," said Flea, taking the chair Mrs. Tayloe pushed up to the table, "and I ought not; but I am so hungry, and everything looks so tempting, that I cannot refuse."
It was a lavish luncheon, and Mrs. Tayloe took a childish delight in pressing her delicacies upon the visitor.
"Hampton," she said, after a while, with a touch of her girlish vivacity, "go get a bottle of that shrub your master makes such a fuss over. I must have Miss Grigsby taste it. Here is the cupboard key."
When it was brought she went on with the same feverish gayety:
"He made it himself four years ago, and he gets stingier and stingier with it every year. It really is mighty good, though I wouldn't tell him so to save his life. He'd kill me if he knew I'd touched it."
"Don't have it opened—please!" begged Flea, checking the hand that held out the corkscrew to the butler. "I really would rather not drink it. I don't care for liquor of any kind."