Amnesiacs -- Fiction; New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Trials -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
The kitchen of the Bogart House was a pleasant room whose two doors
opened out into a tidy latticed vegetable garden and whose outer
arrangement of entry and drying yard were of the "save steps"
description. Sard and her mother had worked these things out together,
for at college, under one of the few strong souls and true brains
that are still left unmartyred in American colleges, the girl had
learned practical ideals of what should be the attitude of the employer
to those who toil for his comfort. It was Sard who had the kitchen
walls painted a sunshiny yellow, selected pretty rag rugs and placed
bookshelves and good reading lights in the room; it was she who had
insisted upon the lattices and ladyslippers and morning-glory vines.
All with the sense of her own pleasure in them, though none of the
people the Bogarts employed seemed to care much for these things. The
young daughter of the house soon began to realize that any bright
sport-hat she herself wore, the set of her skirts, the make of her
shoes, interested Dora and Maggie better than the books she tried to
discuss with them. The name of Edith Cavell did not thrill them as did
the name of the most recent screen actress. They cared only, it seemed,
to catch up with the joy and pleasure of the life ahead of them. They
seemed always to feel that the very stuff of life was arrayed against
them--and sometimes they had reason.
Now as the girl pushed aside the swinging door of the old-fashioned
"butler's pantry," she was half prepared for the interrupted Irish
sentences, the hot questions and answers.
"Is it justice, I ask you; is it justice? To take him now--only
nineteen. When he's sort of wild and notional by nature and traps set
for him? Maybe he dunnit--maybe he dunnit, but he keeps saying he ain't
done it. Oh, my God, my God, I don't know."
The girl stood before the two women in the kitchen, the cook who, like
Sard, wiped her hands and silently handed her the ordering list.
"Thank you, Maggie," said Sard; then, her forehead drawing together,
"Dora, is there anything new?"
The waitress with a gesture of dumb inability to answer, turned away,
and Sard, no asperity in her voice, saw that it was to a resolutely
turned back that she was speaking.
"She blames me, somehow," the girl sighed, "as if I could help it!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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