She gabbled on hygiene. She took tickets for a course of lectures on domestic economy, driving into Liddleshorn every alternate Friday. When she returned, she was more ardent than ever for reform. She penetrated to the scullery, and examined the dishcloth--with a scared murmur of microbes, because it had not been scalded in soda water and hung up in the air to dry. She insisted on making the tea herself in a patent pot. Once she said lightly that Gainah was trying to poison them all because she told the cook to boil halfpence with the cabbage to make it green. The flash in Gainah’s eye had been sinister, but Pamela did not see it. She laughed Jethro out of his favorite supper--a loaf hot from the oven and soaked in cider. She tried very hard to abolish supper as a meal--wishing to call the eight-o’clock meal dinner. But here she was stopped by the opposition of every member of the family; even Aunt Sophy entered a diplomatic protest. She begged Jethro to make Chalcraft wring the necks of the poultry. She couldn’t bear the slow sounds of death. It was barbarous--the slight, skillful slit of the knife, the long bleeding, the fluttering “glug-glug” in the throat, growing fainter and fainter. Gainah had always insisted on that method; she said it made the flesh white. Gainah shut the doomed birds for twenty-four hours before death in a coop, and made them fast, so that they might be more easily got ready for table: Pamela went surreptitiously to the corn sack, and gave them an extra feed before the ordeal. Gainah, in hot weather, hung meat down the well to keep it fresh; she buried sour milk in the earth, tied up in a muslin bag, and dug it up cream cheese. She had a theory about leg of mutton: it should be buried in the earth for three days to make it tender; the same might be done with an old hen. She did not approve of eggs in a milk pudding, and never used butter in white sauce if the milk was new and not skimmed. To waste nothing, to be lavish with nothing--that had been her religion. The hygiene lecturer--through Pamela, who conscientiously took notes--told her that some of her antique tricks were not only dirty, but dangerous. Pamela taught the cook to make bread without touching it with the hand. She told Boyce how to milk the cows, washing his hands in an antiseptic first. She had chemical tests for the milk, and made a rigorous inspection of the dairy each morning. Gainah was calmly put aside as a domestic fossil. She was openly flouted. She was told to sit by the fire, to do nothing. Even needlework was not necessary--things could be bought so cheaply ready-made, ready-marked even.