“SHE.”
By Pansy.
CHAPTER I.
MARGARET was washing the dishes; making a vigorous clash and spatter, and setting down the cups so hard that had they been anything but the good solid iron-stone which they were, they would certainly have suffered under the treatment.
Margaret was noisy in all things, but to-day the usual vigor of movement was manifestly increased by ill humor. There was an ominous setting of a pair of firm lips, and all her face was in a frown. The knives and forks, when their turn came, seemed to increase her ire. She rattled and flung them about with such reckless disregard of consequences that there landed, presently, a lovely tricolored globe of foam in the centre of John’s arithmetic, over which he was at this moment gloomily bending.
“Look here,” he said, half fiercely, half comically, “quit that, will you? This thing is dry enough, I know; but it will take more than soap suds to dampen it.”
“Take your book out of my way, then. What do you s’pose she would say to its being on the table and you bending double over it?”
“She may say just exactly what she pleases. It will stay on the table until I get ready to take it off.”