Elsie carried in the ham, placing the dish on the table beside the carving-knife and fork that were raised upon a “rest” of electro plate. The glass dishes containing a flabby pink decoction of cornflour, and the apple tart, with several slices of pastry gone from the crust, she laid at the other end of the table. “Supper’s in, Mr. Roberts,” she cried through the open door of the drawing-room, but this time she did not go in, and flew back to the kitchen before Mr. Roberts appeared. “Geraldine’s asking for tea, mother.” “There’s a kettle on. She can come and fetch it.” “I’ll take it up,” Elsie volunteered. “You’re very obliging, all of a sudden. I’m sure I only wish you and your sister were more _like_ sisters, the way Aunt Ada and Aunt Gertie and Mother were. There wasn’t any of this bickering between us girls that I hear between you and Geraldine.” “You’ve made up for it later, then,” said Elsie pertly. “The aunts never come here but they find fault with things, and Aunt Ada cries, and I’m sure you and Aunt Gertie go at it hammer and tongs.” “Don’t you dare to speak to me like that, Elsie Palmer,” said her mother abstractedly. (“Give me a spoon, there’s a good gurl.”) “What you gurls are coming to, talking so to your own mother, is more than I can say. What’s at the bottom of all this talk about carrying tea to Geraldine? What are you going to do about your own supper?” “Have it in here. I don’t want much, anyway. I’m not hungry. Tea and bread-and-jam’ll do.” “Please yourself,” said Mrs. Palmer. She was a large, shapeless woman, slatternly and without method, chronically aggrieved because she was a widow with two daughters, obliged to support herself and them by receiving boarders, whom she always spoke of as guests. “Where are these what-you-may-call-’ems--these Williamses--coming from?” Elsie asked, while she was jerking tea from the bottom of a cocoa-tin into a broken earthenware tea-pot. “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” said her mother. She had no slightest reason to conceal the little she knew of the new people who were coming, but it was her habit to reply more or less in this fashion, semi-snubbing, semi-facetious, whenever either of her daughters asked a question. “I’m sure I don’t want to know,” said Elsie, also from habit. She made the tea, poured out two cups-full and took one upstairs. As she had expected, the alarm clock on the wash-stand showed it to be eight o’clock. Almost directly afterwards, she heard the front door slam. No. 15 was a narrow, high house, with very steep stairs, but Elsie was used to them, although she grumbled at the number of times she went up and down them, and she and Geraldine and Mrs. Palmer all kept numerous articles of toilet and clothing in the kitchen, so as to save journeys backwards and forwards. She now went down once more, and sitting at a corner of the newspaper-covered kitchen table, drank tea and ate bread-and-jam deliberately. “That’s the bell!”