Time Will Darken It Read Online Free PDF

need as much to keep me going as you young people. Pshaw! you’ve given me too much of everything, my dear … Alice … Lucy … come help yourselves. This is a buffet supper and you’re not supposed to hang back in the doorway.”
    “Aunt Ione, let me give you a better piece of chicken,” Martha said to Mrs. Potter. “You’ve got the part that goes over the fence last.”
    “It’s the piece I like,” Mrs. Potter protested. “I never get it at home because it’s Mr. Potter’s favourite. I wouldn’t dare take it if we weren’t visiting.”
    “Well, here’s the wishbone to go with it.”
    “If this keeps up I’ll go home stuffed out like a toad,” Mrs. Potter said, helping herself to celery and then a ripe olive and crabapple jelly. “You must give me your receipt for pocket-book rolls. Mine never turn out like this.”
    “I don’t suppose there’s any way to get the men to continue their conversation in here,” Martha said. “Alice, you haven’t anything on your plate at all. Here, let me help you.… Now then, don’t forget the roll.… There’s no onion in the salad, Mrs. Danforth. I remembered that you don’t eat it.… Mrs. Ellis, what will you have? A wishbone? The wing?”
    “When I was a girl,” Mrs. Beach said, “young women of good family were taught to cook as a matter of course, even though there often wasn’t any need for them to, after they were married. Unless you know how food should be prepared, you can’t tell someone else how to do it.” (And even if you tell your daughters how to act at a party, there is nothing you can do about the look of sadness that returns after every effort at animation.) “I used to entertain a great deal when we lived in St. Paul. Mr. Beach was in the wholesale grocery business there, and he loved to invite people to our home. I often spent days getting ready beforehand. Now the young women just slap something together and call it a dinner party.”
    “Cousin Martha,” Mrs. Potter said slyly, “if you just slapped this together——”
    “Martha is an exception,” Mrs. Beach said, and passed on down the table.
    The men appeared to be in no hurry to get into the dining-room. While they stood in a little group outside discussing the price of hogs, Austin King went to the hall closet and got out the card-tables for Thelma. When these were set up, one in the study and three in the living-room, he stood with his back to the fireplace enjoying a moment of pride in the house and in his wife. He had watched her come down the stairs in a white dress with a large silk rose at her waist, looking as lovely (the dress was his favourite and she had worn it to please him) as any woman ever looked. The roomful of people had stopped talking for a few seconds, and then unable to remember what they had been about to say, they went on talking about something else.
    In the dining-room Nora Potter said, “I don’t know what will happen to me if I ever get married. I can’t cook and I hate sewing. Brother says if I never learn to keep house, somebody will always have to do it for me. But just the same, I do envy and admire you, Cousin Martha.”
    “You haven’t any salad,” Martha King said. “Here … let me help you to it.”
    Immediately afterwards Nora plunged back into the conversation with Lucy Beach, a conversation that had nothing to do with housekeeping. “Do you think people are happiest,” Martha heard her say as they moved out of the dining-room, “when they don’t even know that they’re happy?”
    At that moment the men, who had merely been biding their time, closed around the table and with no pretence of a poor or finicky appetite, helped themselves to everything within reach.
    Old Mr. Ellis, returning to the living-room with his plate in his hand, provided a moment of suspense for everybody. He was frail and uncertain in his movements but no one dared to take the plate from him, and the catastrophe they were all expecting did