The bread was cut with the best intentions, but it was thick and plastered with slabs of butter. The tea, by way of showing hospitality, was so strong that no amount of sugar could remove the bitterness.
“I say, what a beautiful cake!” cried Bertram.
“I made it with my own ’ands,” said Mrs. Railing, much gratified.
“There’s no one like mother for making cakes,” said Bertram, regaining his spirits, which had been damped by the appearance of Mrs. Cooper.
But this remark was taken by that lady as a deliberate slight to herself.
“You’ve got no cause to say that, Bertie,” she remarked, bitterly. “Many’s the cake you’ve eaten of my making in my ’ouse at Shepherd’s Bush. And they was quite good enough for you then.”
“You make excellent cakes too, Mrs. Cooper,” he answered.
But she was not to be so easily appeased.
“I take it very ’ard that you should treat me like this, Bertie,” she added, in a lachrymose way. “And you wouldn’t ’ave been alive to-day if it ’adn’t been for me.”
“No, that you wouldn’t, Bertie!” acknowledged his mother.