Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, yes; everything! Only tell!”
Campbell, struggling to recover himself: “Why, you see, Agnes engaged a cook, up-town—”
Mrs. Roberts: “I didn’t want you to know it, Amy. I thought you would be troubled if you knew you were coming to visit me just when I was trying to break in a new cook, and so I told Edward not to let Willis know. Go on, Willis.”
Mrs. Campbell: “And I understand just how you felt about it, Agnes; you knew he’d laugh. Go on, Willis.”
Campbell: “And she sent her down here, and told Roberts to keep her till she came herself.”
Both Ladies: “Well?”
Campbell: “And I found poor old Roberts here, looking out for a cook that he’d never seen before, and expecting to recognize a woman that he’d never met in his life.” He explodes in another fit of laughter. The ladies stare at him in mystification.
Mrs. Roberts: “I would have stayed myself to meet her, but I’d left my plush bag with my purse in it at Stearns’s, and I had to go back after it.”
Mrs. Campbell: “She had to leave him. What is there to laugh at?”
Mrs. Roberts: “I see nothing to laugh at, Willis.”