“But, Cousin Keith,” said Brooke, as soon as she could be heard, and struggling not to laugh at the outpouring of words, which, when the farm was the topic, she soon found flowed as steadily as Niagara, “I do not expect to keep female help from the city.”
“Oh, you relied on getting them from about here, then? Well, I’m afraid you’ll find it a scant market, unless you’ll put up with coloured; the American girls won’t live out in families where they set them at separate tables, and I don’t blame them. There’s old Mrs. Peck, she sometimes accommodates for a month or so, as a working housekeeper in confinement cases, but she is old-fashioned New England and wouldn’t take to city ways. Why, she would think her soul lost if she used prepared flour for her buckwheat cakes instead of setting them with yeast, and she sticks to soda and cream of tartar, which she understands the workings of, for all baking, as she claims that baking powder isn’t plain and above board and so is to be avoided, though I must say her tea biscuits took the prize over mine at the Gordon fair.”
Once again Brooke shook her head, this time not trying to suppress her laughter,—“I have no intention of keeping any household help whatsoever,” she managed to say at last.
Miss Keith stopped short with a gasp, as if a pail of ice-water had been poured upon her head, and then said: “No hired help! then who is to do the cooking, and what will you eat? If this was Stonebridge, you could get table board at the Inn, though it is expensive, and the people that often stop here in driving, to buy my fresh cake, complain that it isn’t satisfactory.”
“Cousin Keith, you must take me seriously. I do not think you understood the letter that I wrote, telling you we were coming here. _I_ am going to do the work; fifty dollars a month is our present income, and I do not mean to touch the little principal we have, but keep it in case of accident,—at least until I am in working order and have devised some plan for earning more. All I hope to do is to get some good woman, like your Mrs. Peck, to come here for a few weeks and teach me how to cook plain food and be economical, for it is the other part that I understand, and learned at Lucy Dean’s cooking class, to make cake, and candy, and all the little supper dishes in a chafing-dish. Adam has already promised that he will make the fires and do the heavy things, so you see I’m not so badly off after all. You mustn’t look so discouragingly at me, Cousin Keith. You see the only way for us to earn money in the very beginning is by not spending it.”