Thus, when it was announced that father had been called out
unexpectedly, leaving an order that they were not to wait for him, she
said gaily that they had better be obedient and begin, though it would
have been more agreeable to wait for father. And she said how beautiful
the tea was, and how beautiful the toast, and how beautiful the
strawberry-jam, and how beautiful the pikelets. She would herself pour
some hot water into the slop basin, and put a pikelet on a plate
thereon, covered, to keep warm for father. She would not hear a word
about the toast being a little hard, and when Maggie in her curious
quiet way `stuck her out' that the toast was in fact hard, she said that
that precise degree of hardness was the degree which she, for herself,
preferred. Then she talked of jams, and mentioned gooseberry-jam,
whereupon Clara privately put her tongue out, with the quickness of a
snake, to signal to Maggie.
"Ours isn't good this year," said Maggie.
"I told auntie we weren't so set up with it, a fortnight ago," said
Clara simply, like a little angel.
"Did you, dear?" Mrs Hamps exclaimed, with great surprise, almost with
shocked surprise. "I'm sure it's beautiful. I was quite looking
forward to tasting it; quite! I know what your gooseberry-jam is."
"Would you like to try it now?" Maggie suggested. "But we've warned
you."
"Oh, I don't want to trouble you _now_. We're all so cosy here. Any
time--"
"No trouble, auntie," said Clara, with her most captivating and innocent
smile.
"Well, if you talk about `warning' me, of course I must insist on having
some," said Auntie Clara.
Clara jumped up, passed behind Mrs Hamps, making a contemptuous face at
those curls as she did so, and ran gracefully down to the kitchen.
"Here," she said crossly to Mrs Nixon. "A pot of that gooseberry,
please. A small one will do. She knows it's short of sugar, and so
she's determined to try it, just out of spite; and nothing will stop
her."
Clara returned smiling to the tea-table, and Maggie neatly unsealed the
jam; and Auntie Clara, with a face beaming with pleasurable
anticipation, helped herself circumspectly to a spoonful.
"Beautiful!" she murmured.
"Don't you think it's a bit tart?" Maggie asked.
"Oh no!" protestingly.
"_Don't_ you?" asked Clara, with an air of delighted deferential
astonishment.
"Oh _no_!" Mrs Hamps repeated. "It's beautiful!" She did not smack her
lips over it, because she would have considered it unladylike to smack
her lips, but by less offensive gestures she sought to convey her
unbounded pleasure in the jam. "How much sugar did you put in?" she
inquired after a while. "Half and half?"
"Yes," said Maggie.
"They do say gooseberries were a tiny bit sour this year, owing to the
weather," said Mrs Hamps reflectively.
Clara kicked Edwin under the table, as it were viciously, but her
delightful innocent smile, directed vaguely upon Mrs Hamps, did not
relax. Such duplicity passed Edwin's comprehension; it seemed to him
purposeless. Yet he could not quite deny that there might be a certain
sting, a certain insinuation, in his auntie's last remark.
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