Fathers and daughters -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction
"Bready butter pudding, Pa?" she inquired. The old man whinnied with
delight, and Emmy was appeased. She had one satisfied client, at any
rate. She cut into the pudding with a knife, producing wedges with a
dexterous hand.
"Hey ho!" observed Jenny to herself, tastelessly beginning the work of
laborious demolition.
"Jenny thinks it's common. She ought to have the job of getting the
meals!" cried Emmy, bitterly, obliquely attacking her sister by talking
at her. "Something to talk about then!" she sneered with chagrin, up in
arms at a criticism.
"Well, the truth is," drawled Jenny.... "If you want it ... I don't like
bread pudding." Somehow she had never said that before, in all the
years; but it seemed to her that bread pudding was like ashes in the
mouth. It was like duty, or funerals, or ... stew.
"The stuff's _got_ to be finished up!" flared Emmy defiantly, with a
sense of being adjudged inferior because she had dutifully habituated
herself to the appreciation of bread pudding. "You might think of that!
What else am I to do?"
"That's just it, old girl. Just why I don't like it. I just _hate_ to
feel I'm finishing it up. Same with stew. I know it's been something
else first. It's not _fresh_. Same old thing, week in, week out.
Finishing up the scraps!"
"Proud stomach!" A quick flush came into Emmy's cheeks; and tears
started to her eyes.
"Perhaps it is. Oh, but Em! Don't you feel like that
yourself.... Sometimes? O-o-h!..." She drawled the word wearily. "Oh
for a bit more money! Then we could give stew to the cat's-meat man
and bread to old Thompson's chickens. And then we could have nice things
to eat. Nice birds and pastry ... and trifle, and ices, and wine.... Not
all this muck!"
"Muck!" cried Emmy, her lips seeming to thicken. "When I'm so
hot.... And sick of it all! _You_ go out; you do just exactly what you
like.... And then you come home and...." She began to gulp. "What about
me?"
"Well, it's just as bad for both of us!" Jenny did not think so really;
but she said it. She thought Emmy had the bread and butter pudding
nature, and that she did not greatly care what she ate as long as it was
not too fattening. Jenny thought of Emmy as born for housework and
cooking--of stew and bread puddings. For herself she had dreamed a
nobler destiny, a destiny of romance, of delicious unknown things,
romantic and indescribably exciting. She was to have the adventures,
because she needed them. Emmy didn't need them. It was all very well for
Emmy to say "What about me!" It was no business of hers what happened to
Emmy. They were different. Still, she repeated more confidently because
there had been no immediate retort:
"Well, it's just as bad for both of us! _Just_ as bad!"
"'Tisn't! You're out all day--doing what you like!"
"Oh!" Jenny's eyes opened with theatrical wideness at such a perversion
of the facts. "Doing what I like! The millinery!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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