Mistress of the House by Eleanor Farnes Read Free Book Online

course she lives quite a different life from you, but you both have that nice common sense attitude to life. She makes a wholetime job of housekeeping. All the jams and preserves are homemade; they wouldn’t have a shop cake in the house either; and Mrs. Lorney has no use for laundries. She copes with a simply enormous wash each week.
    Roger, and Max too, seem to want me to like it here and to stay here. Roger is pleasant but not personal. He quite obviously has his thoughts elsewhere. His mind is always straying. He likes to go out in the evenings, although it means changing and going off after a real hard day of it; and he goes off on Sundays, too; and has a hankering for fresh fields and pastures new. Of course, Max is the boss here, and I think it irks Roger a bit. He’d like to be boss somewhere. Max is really very nice; he seems to have taken me under his wing. I think he probably does it to counteract Jessica’s unaccountable rudeness.
    The other evening, for instance, I had written one or two letters, and found that I was out of stamps, so I asked Mrs. Lorney if she had any. Well, apparently, here you buy stamps from the postman when he delivers letters at about ten in the morning—and I, of course, am usually at White Lodge by then. But she said that Max would have some in the office, and that he was there busy with his correspondence if I liked to go along. So along I went, tapped at the door and went in. The office is quite a bare little room, anyway, and in the evening, without a fire and with rather an inferior oil lamp, it looked quite cheerless. Max didn’t seem to notice it. He said he could let me have stamps, and opened a small drawer to get them out. I saw that he was typing, and it seemed an odd thing for him to be doing. I asked him if he always did it “Yes,” he said, “but probably not at all professionally. And only with two fingers, you know.” So I told him that with an expert the house, he should make use of her. “I shouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “You have one job to do.” So we argued back and forth, pleasantly and politely, and the upshot of it was that I sat down at the typewriter (a battered old warrior that hadn’t been oiled for years) and Max sat in the desk armchair and dictated. He said it made him feel very plutocratic, and a little embarrassed, but we knocked off his correspondence very quickly, and I rattled off the envelopes and stamped the lot; and we leaned back in our chairs, very pleased with ourselves. He said: “Miss Giles, you’re a revelation to me. I never before knew anybody who combined efficiency with beauty, and both with such charming naturalness.” Well, that was a bouquet, wasn’t it? but of course I disclaimed the beauty part of it. Don’t imagine, though, because he talks like that, that he is getting fond of your daughter, Mrs. Giles. I think he likes me, but it’s a most impersonal liking. One thing he said, however, I really did like. He said the house was a brighter place for my being in it.
    Well, when we had talked for a while we went back into the kitchen. I’d like you to see this kitchen as it is in the evening, when the work of the day is done. The curtains are drawn, and the top of the range is opened so that the firelight spills out into the room, and makes lovely reflections in all Mrs. Lorney’s copper pans. She has some beautiful copper; old preserving pans and enormous kettles and queerly shaped jugs; and they all shine spotless on a dark, carved dresser which they have to themselves. There are several chairs of varying degrees of easiness which are gathered round the fire in the evenings, and we sit round in a circle, such of us as stay at home, reading or sewing or talking. It’s very pleasant On this particular evening, Mrs. Lorney was in her special big chair, and Roger was sitting opposite, smoking and listening to light music from the battery radio. Jessica was tackling some of the ironing. They all looked at us as we