The ladies kissed each other. Mrs. Putney was dressed in the black silk of a woman who has one silk; she was red from the kitchen, but all was neat and orderly in the hasty toilet which she must have made since leaving the cook-stove. A faint, mixed perfume of violet sachet and fricasseed chicken attended her.
“Well, as you were saying, Ralph?” she suggested.
“Oh, I was just tracing a little parallel between Hatboro' and Sheol,” replied her husband.
Mrs. Putney made a tchk of humorous patience, and laughed toward Annie for sympathy. “Well, then, I guess you needn't go on. Tea's ready. Shall we wait for the doctor?”
“No; doctors are too uncertain. We'll wait for him while we're eating. That's what fetches him the soonest. I'm hungry. Ain't you, Win?”
“Not so very,” said the boy, with his queer promptness. He stood resting himself on his crutches at the door, and he now wheeled about, and led the way out to the living-room, swinging himself actively forward. It seemed that his haste was to get to the dumb-waiter in the little china closet opening off the dining-room, which was like the papered inside of a square box. He called to the girl below, and helped pull it up, as Annie could tell by the creaking of the rope, and the light jar of the finally arriving crockery. A half-grown girl then appeared, and put the dishes on at the places indicated with nods and looks by Mrs. Putney, who had taken her place at the table. There was a platter of stewed fowl, and a plate of high-piled waffles, sweltering in successive courses of butter and sugar. In cut-glass dishes, one at each end of the table, there were canned cherries and pine-apple. There was a square of old-fashioned soda biscuit, not broken apart, which sent up a pleasant smell; in the centre of the table was a shallow vase of strawberries.
It was all very good and appetising; but to Annie it was pathetically old-fashioned, and helped her to realise how wholly out of the world was the life which her friends led.
“Winthrop,” said Putney, and the father and mother bowed their heads.
The boy dropped his over his folded hands, and piped up clearly: “Our Father, which art in heaven, help us to remember those who have nothing to eat. Amen!”
“That's a grace that Win got up himself,” his father explained, beginning to heap a plate with chicken and mashed potato, which he then handed to Annie, passing her the biscuit and the butter. “We think it suits the Almighty about as well as anything.”