Mary Elizabeth nodded. “They like our parlour best,” she said. “They ain’t any furniture in there. They don’t come much in the kitchen.”
It was the same at our house. They were always lurking in the curtained parlour, but the cheery, busy kitchen seldom knew them—except when one went out for a drink of water late at night. Then They barely escaped one.
How she understood! Delia I loved with all the loyalties, but I could not help remembering a brief conversation that I had once held with her.
“Do you have Theys at your house?” I had asked her, at the beginning of our acquaintance.
“Yes,” she admitted readily. “Company all this week. From Oregon. They do their hairs on kids.”
“I don’t mean them,” I explained. “I mean Theys, that live in between your rooms.”
“We don’t let mice get in our house,” she replied loftily. “Only sometimes one gets in the woodshed. Do you use Choke-’em traps, or Catch-’em-alive traps and have the cat there?”
“Catch-them-alive-and-let-them-out-in-the-alley traps,” I told her, and gave up hope, I remember, and went on grating more sugar-stone for the mud-pie icing.
Mary Elizabeth and I made mud pies that morning too, but all the time we made them we pretended. Not House-keep, or Store, or Bakery, or Church-sale—none of these pale pretendings to which I had chiefly been bound, save when I played alone. But now every pie and cake that we finished we two carried carefully and laid here and there, under raspberry bushes, in the crotch of the apple tree, on the wood-chopper’s block.
“For Them to get afterwards,” we said briefly. We did not explain—I do not think that we could have explained. And we knew nothing of the old nights in the motherland when from cottage supper tables scraps of food were flung through open doors for One Waiting Without. But this business made an even more excellent thing of mud-pie baking, always a delectable pastime.