“With the wheat-ear hat! What’s the good of that if you won’t have a chance of going out?” “One of my new tea-gowns, then?” “I never did hold with tea-gowns in the morning,” Stevens answered lugubriously. “I suppose Mr. Stanton will be coming over. Not but what he’ll get wet through.” “I shouldn’t be surprised if he came all the same.” Margaret smiled, and the omniscient maid reflected the smile, if a little sourly. “There’s never no saying. There’s that telephone going. Another mistake, I suppose. I wish I’d the drilling of them girls. Oh! I’m coming, I’m coming!” she cried out to the insensitive instrument. “Don’t you attempt to get up till I come back. You’re going to have a fire to dress by; calendar or no calendar, it’s as cold as winter.” Margaret watched the rain driving in wind gusts against the window until Stevens came back. Somehow the rain seemed to have altered everything, she felt the fatigue of her broken night, the irritability of her frayed nerves. “It’s that there Dr. Kennedy. He wants to know how soon he may come over. He says he’s got something to tell you. ‘All the fat’s in the fire,’ he said. ‘Am I to tell her that?’ I arst him. ‘Tell her anything you like,’ he answered, ‘but find out how soon I can see her.’ Very arbitrary he was and impatient, as if I’d nothing to do but give and take his messages.” “Tell him I’m just getting up. I can be ready in half an hour.” “I shall tell him nothing of the sort. Half an hour, indeed, with your bath and everything, and no breakfast, and the fire not yet lit. Nor one of the rooms done, I shouldn’t think....” “Tell him I’ll see him in half an hour,” Margaret persisted. “Now go away, that’s a good woman, and do as you are told. Don’t stand there arguing, or I’ll answer the telephone myself.” She put one foot out of bed as if to be as good as her word, and Stevens, grumbling and astonished, went to do her bidding. Half an hour seemed too long for Margaret. What had Peter Kennedy to tell her? Had he met or seen Mrs. Roope? “All the fat was in the fire.” What fat, what fire? The phrase foreshadowed comedy and not tragedy. But that was nothing for Peter Kennedy, who was in continual need of editing, who had not the gift of expression nor the capacity of appropriate words. She scrambled in and out of her bath, to Stevens’s indignation, never waiting for the room to be warmed. She was impatient about her hair, would not sit still to have it properly brushed, but took the long strands in her own hands and “twisted them up anyhow.” Stevens’s description of the whole toilette would have been sorry reading in a dress magazine or ladies’ paper. “Give me anything,” she says, “anything. What does it matter? He’ll be here any minute now. The old dressing-gown, or a shirt and skirt. Whichever is quickest. What a slowcoach you’re getting!” “Slowcoach! She called me a slowcoach, and from first to last it hadn’t been twenty minutes.”