Jim was sulky. He dropped into a chair and stretched out his legs,
looking gloomily at nothing. Then he got up and ambled into his den,
closing the door behind him without having spoken a word. It was more
than human nature could stand.
When I went into the den he was stretched on the davenport with his face
buried in the cushions. He looked absolutely wilted, and every line of
him was drooping.
"Go on out, Kit," he said, in a smothered voice. "Be a good girl and
don't follow me around."
"You are shameless!" I gasped. "Follow you! When you are hung around
my neck like a--like a--" Millstone was what I wanted to say, but I
couldn't think of it.
He turned over and looked up from his cushions like an ill-treated and
suffering cherub.
"I'm done for, Kit," he groaned. "Bella went up to the studio after we
left, and investigated that corner."
"What did she find? The necklace?" I asked eagerly. He was too wretched
to notice this.
"No, that picture of you that I did last winter. She is crazy--she says
she is going upstairs and sit in Takahiro's room and take smallpox and
die."
"Fiddlesticks!" I said rudely, and somebody hammered on the door and
opened it.
"Pardon me for disturbing you," Bella said, in her best
dear-me-I'm-glad-I-knocked manner. "But--Flannigan says the dinner has
not come."
"Good Lord!" Jim exclaimed. "I forgot to order the confounded dinner!"
It was eight o'clock by that time, and as it took an hour at least
after telephoning the order, everybody looked blank when they heard. The
entire family, except Mr. Harbison, who had not appeared again, escorted
Jim to the telephone and hung around hungrily, suggesting new dishes
every minute. And then--he couldn't raise Central. It was fifteen
minutes before we gave up, and stood staring at one another
despairingly.
"Call out of a window, and get one of those infernal reporters to
do something useful for once," Max suggested. But he was indignantly
hushed. We would have starved first. Jim was peering into the
transmitter and knocking the receiver against his hand, like a watch
that had stopped. But nothing happened. Flannigan reported a box of
breakfast food, two lemons, and a pineapple cheese, a combination that
didn't seem to lend itself to anything.
We went back to the dining room from sheer force of habit and sat around
the table and looked at the lemonade Flannigan had made. Anne WOULD talk
about the salad her last cook had concocted, and Max told about a little
town in Connecticut where the restaurant keeper smokes a corn-cob pipe
while he cooks the most luscious fried clams in America. And Aunt Selina
related that in her family they had a recipe for chicken smothered in
cream. And then we sipped the weak lemonade and nibbled at the cheese.