Oh, Alice was wild. She wasn’t one to mind being told, but there was something in the way Miss Beryl had of speaking to her that she couldn’t stand. Oh, that she couldn’t. It made her curl up inside, as you might say, and she fair trembled. But what Alice really hated Miss Beryl for was that she made her feel low. She talked to Alice in a special voice as though she wasn’t quite all there; and she never lost her temper with her—never. Even when Alice dropped anything or forgot anything important Miss Beryl seemed to have expected it to happen. “If you please, Mrs. Burnell,” said an imaginary Alice, as she buttered the scones, “I’d rather not take my orders from Miss Beryl. I may be only a common servant girl as doesn’t know how to play the guitar, but . . .” This last thrust pleased her so much that she quite recovered her temper. “The only thing to do,” she heard, as she opened the dining-room door, “is to cut the sleeves out entirely and just have a broad band of black velvet over the shoulders instead. . . .” 11 The white duck did not look as if it had ever had a head when Alice placed it in front of Stanley Burnell that night. It lay, in beautifully basted resignation, on a blue dish—its legs tied together with a piece of string and a wreath of little balls of stuffing round it. It was hard to say which of the two, Alice or the duck, looked the better basted; they were both such a rich colour and they both had the same air of gloss and strain. But Alice was fiery red and the duck a Spanish mahogany. Burnell ran his eye along the edge of the carving knife. He prided himself very much upon his carving, upon making a first-class job of it. He hated seeing a woman carve; they were always too slow and they never seemed to care what the meat looked like afterwards. Now he did; he took a real pride in cutting delicate shaves of cold beef, little wads of mutton, just the right thickness, and in dividing a chicken or a duck with nice precision. . . . “Is this the first of the home products?” he asked, knowing perfectly well that it was. “Yes, the butcher did not come. We have found out that he only calls twice a week.” But there was no need to apologise. It was a superb bird. It wasn’t meat at all, but a kind of very superior jelly. “My father would say,” said Burnell, “this must have been one of those birds whose mother played to it in infancy upon the German flute. And the sweet strains of the dulcet instrument acted with such effect upon the infant mind. . . . Have some more, Beryl? You and I are the only ones in this house with a real feeling for food. I’m perfectly willing to state, in a court of law, if necessary, that I love good food.”