“You’d better see the kitchen. It’s
awfully nice;” and they went along.
At the kitchen door she paused and began in a mysterious
whisper a long account of the servants. “I
think they’ll turn out quite nice girls.
They’re sisters, you know, and they’re
glad to be in a place together. They’ve
both got young men in the village. Fancy, the
cook told me that at Mrs. Wellington’s where
she was, at Chovensbury, she wasn’t allowed
to use soda for washing up because Mrs. Wellington
fussed so frightfully about the pattern on her china!
Fancy, in their family they’ve got eleven brothers
and sisters. Isn’t it awful how those kind
of people—”
Her voice got lower and lower. She seemed to
Mark to be quivering with some sort of repressed excitement,
as though the two maids were some rare exhibit which
she had captured with a net and placed in the kitchen,
and whom it was rather thrilling to open the door upon
and peep at. He could hardly hear her voice and
had to bend his head. It was dim in the lobby
outside the kitchen door. The dimness, her intense
whispers and her excitement made him feel that he
was in some mysterious conspiracy with her. The
whole atmosphere of the house and of this tour of
inspection, which had been deliciously absorbing, became
mysteriously conspiratorial, unpleasing.
“...She’s been to a school of cookery
at Tidborough. She attended the whole course!”
“Good. That’s the stuff!”
“Hush!”
Why hush? What a funny business this was!
Mabel opened the kitchen door. “The master’s
come to see how nice the kitchen looks.”
Two maids in black dresses and an extraordinary amount
of stiffly starched aprons and caps and streamers
rose awkwardly and bobbed awkward little bows.
One was very tall, the other rather short. The
tall one looked extraordinarily severe and the short
one extraordinarily glum, Mark thought, to have young
men. Mabel looked from the girls to Mark and
from Mark to the girls, precisely as if she were exhibiting
rare specimens to her husband and her husband to her
rare specimens. And in the tone of one exhibiting
pinned, dried, and completely impersonal specimens,
she announced, “They’re sisters. Their
name is Jinks.”
Mark, examining the exhibits, had been feeling like
a fool. Their name humanized them and relieved
his awkward feeling. “Ha! Jinks, eh?
High Jinks and Low Jinks, what?” He laughed.
It struck him as rather comic; and High Jinks and
Low Jinks tittered broadly, losing in the most astonishing
way the one her severity and the other her glumness.
Mabel seemed suddenly to have lost her interest in
her exhibits and their cage. She rather hurried
Mark through the kitchen premises and, moving into
the garden, replied rather abstractedly to his plans
for the garden’s development.
Suddenly she said, “Mark, I do wish you hadn’t
said that in the kitchen.”
