"You always make matters worse, when you touch the fire."
As if in contradiction, a bright tongue of flame darted up between the sticks, and the fire began chattering and snapping defiance at me. Now, if there's anything which would provoke a saint, it is to be jeered and snapped at in that way by a man's own fire. It's an unbearable impertinence. I threw out my leg impatiently, and hit Rover, who yelped a yelp that finished the upset of my nerves. I gave him a hearty kick, that he might have something to yelp for, and in the movement upset Jennie's embroidery-basket.
"Oh, papa!"
"Confound your baskets and balls! they are everywhere, so that a man can't move; useless, wasteful things, too."
"Wasteful?" said Jennie, coloring indignantly; for if there's anything Jennie piques herself upon, it's economy.
"Yes, wasteful,—wasting time and money both. Here are hundreds of shivering poor to be clothed, and Christian females sit and do nothing but crochet worsted into useless knicknacks. If they would be working for the poor, there would be some sense in it. But it's all just alike, no real Christianity in the world,—nothing but organized selfishness and self-indulgence."
"My dear," said Mrs. Crowfield, "you are not well to-night. Things are not quite so desperate as they appear. You haven't got over Christmas-week."
"I am well. Never was better. But I can see, I hope, what's before my eyes; and the fact is, Mrs. Crowfield, things must not go on as they are going. There must be more care, more attention to details. There's Maggie,—that girl never does what she is told. You are too slack with her, Ma'am. She will light the fire with the last paper, and she won't put my slippers in the right place; and I can't have my study made the general catch-all and menagerie for Rover and Jennie, and her baskets and balls, and for all the family litter."
Just at this moment I overheard a sort of aside from Jennie, who was swelling with repressed indignation at my attack on her worsted. She sat with her back to me, knitting energetically, and said, in a low, but very decisive tone, as she twitched her yarn,—
"Now if I should talk in that way, people would call me cross,—and that's the whole of it."