the kitchen, carrying Hope wrapped in blankets. They spent most of their time in the kitchen. It was the warmest room in the house, and generally empty of maids, although now and then a Delia or an Oscarina came for a few days. But the house was lonely and inconvenient, and people still called it haunted. "Sure, I'm sorry to say, Mrs. Green—" or, "Ay bane leavin'—" or, sometimes, without farewell, they never came back from their Thursday out.
Evelyn struggled with the cookbook; tears and cigarette ashes fell into the frying pan; hot grease spat out and burnt her wrists. Snow piled against the windows, filled the empty road, fell silently in the gathering dusk. "Everybody's here," her mother wrote from Palm Beach, where she was staying with Mrs. Prather. "Ralph L. gave a big fancy-dress dance for the youngest du Moulin girl; he was a Rajah in purple with a tight cloth-of-silver turban. I wore that old black tulle Pierrette thing, and Lotta Prather was a white peacock with a long train of feathers that turned up when she pulled a string—you never saw such a sight in your life. R. had a dancing floor built out under the palms, with colored lanterns, and everyone went in swimming at sunrise"
"Oh, Joe, I must dance or I'll burst!" Evelyn cried. So they went into town with Hope and a suit case, and in Charlotte's good-taste guest room with its empty Venetian-glass perfume bottles and empty painted tin match box, and Pathways to Peace and A Wanderer
