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Her glance conveyed a scornful reproach that he could eat at all in such circumstances, and, that there might be no mistake as to her own feelings, she ostentatiously pushed the toast-rack and egg-stand away from her. "You you're not eating, my dear," said Mr. Chalk. "If I ate anything it would choke me," was the reply. Mr. Chalk affected surprise, but his voice quavered.
The sugar-basin formed, on one side of the tray, a pendant to the cream-jug on the other, and inasmuch as the cream-jug was small, a toast-rack was coupled with it to constitute the necessary balance.
He stretched his arm across the table, missing the cream-jug by a narrow margin, but knocking the toast-rack over in his eagerness. He held his hand out to the empty chair. "Please take my hand," he said, "and let me have something too." He went through the pantomime of shaking hands, but to his intense amazement it seemed that there was an answering clasp.
She must suggest to Methuselah that he could find, perhaps, a more suitable book-mark for Robinson Crusoe than his piece of bread and molasses, and intimate doubts as to the propriety of Nate's standing on the table-cloth and sitting on the toast-rack. And then Moppet was at that baby again, dropping very cold pennies down his neck.
Shivering with the wet on his pallid skin, he thought this over. His landlady had used her discretion, and there was toast on the table. A beam of Spring's morning sunlight illuminated the toast-rack. He sat, and ate, and munched the doubt whether "not till" included the final day, or stopped short of it. By this the state of his brain may be conceived.
There were some letters for me, and I turned them over listlessly, balancing them tip in succession against the toast-rack in front of me, without opening any. The last I came to was quite different from any of the others, and being the last, it stood foremost before me, and I looked at it while I went on with my breakfast. It is curious how representative a letter generally is of its writer.
Now please run away, and take Miss Mitchell's dinner up to her; she is to have a little pie to-night and some baked potatoes; they are all waiting, and hot in the oven, and then please go back to the children." Anne, a really good-tempered little maid-of-all-work, vanished, and Mrs. Home made some fresh toast, which she set, brown, hot, and crisp, in the china toast-rack.
For were they not privy to the doom that the morrow, or the morrow's morrow, held for him held not indeed for him alone, yet for him especially, as it were, and for him most lamentably? The breakfast-things were not yet cleared away. A plate freaked with fine strains of marmalade, an empty toast-rack, a broken roll these and other things bore witness to a day inaugurated in the right spirit.
Another 'word to the newly-married. Be not over-solicitous of wedding-presents. They carry a terrible rate of interest. A silver toast-rack will never leave you a Bank Holiday secure, and a breakfast service means at least a fortnight's 'change' to one or more irrelevant persons twice a year. They have been known to stay a month on the strength of an egg-boiler. So, be warned, I pray you.
"I always knew that," returned he, reaching self-satisfiedly for the toast-rack. "Well, I'm sure your glass never told you so!" was the withering retort. Mr. Crane did not lift his neck so high after that. The grin that went round the table was too crushingly unanimous. Mrs. Blodgett was helped in her duties by her niece, Miss Maria, and by her sister, Miss Williams.
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