CHAPTER XII. Sawn off the Old Block.
The big Harrison villa,—with its broad ostentatious drive, its unsightly smear of cement bridge spoiling the green dip in the lawn, its elaborate superstructure which told of contractors' supplies bought at a dealers' reduction—soon became familiar to Daisy from its concrete cellar to its attic that resounded, mornings, with the virile thudding of young Harold's punching bag.
"Don't you ever put anything on a shelf, or hang anything up, or turn anything off?" she demanded, one morning, as, coming down from the top floor with her broom, she passed the door where the heir of the house of Harrison stood in his dressing-gown, combing back his thick black hair before a mirror.
"Whence the query, fair one?" said Harold, playfully.
"Well," said Daisy, stopping in the doorway with the roses of recent exertion coloring her cheeks superbly, her eyes dancing in their bright challenging way, and her plump arms displayed to fine and not unconscious advantage as she folded them over the broom-handle which leaned in the bend of her elbow; "one of your boxing-gloves was under the shower-bath, with the water running on it; and your sweater was on the floor below the punching bag, tramped in the dust——"
"There shouldn't be any dust up there," said Harold, easily; "What do you suppose we pay our little housemaids for? Uh?"
"Is that so!" retorted Daisy; "well, you'd better give orders for the wind not to blow, then; and you'd better have your father pull up that nasty concrete drive, where all the dust comes from; and——"
"See here! See-e here!" Sir Thomas Harrison's son jerked out, spinning on his heel and facing her; "what do you mean by talking to me like that? Who do you think you're speaking to—the chauffeur or the stable-boy? Get on downstairs, or wherever you're going, and don't have so much to say." Then, as the young heir of the place turned again to the mirror, he added in audible soliloquy, "dashed cheek! These infernal domestics are getting to think they can do and say what they please. Some of these days that cook and I are going to have a rumpus too. She chooses coolly to forget, and to keep right on forgetting, the instructions I give her about my food.—What! you here yet?"
"Yes!" said Daisy, looking at him with her cheeks burning redly and her eyes fixed and bright; "I'm here yet—Mister Harold!"
"Oh, a-all right," observed the young man, sarcastically, throwing out his palm with an elaborate motion toward a chair; "won't you have a seat, Miss—er—er— Miss Housemaid?"