"Good. That's the stuff!"

"Hush!"

Why hush? What a funny business this was!


VIII

Mabel opened the kitchen door. "The master's come to see how nice the
kitchen looks."

Two maids in black dresses and an extraordinary amount of stiffly
starched aprons and caps and streamers rose awkwardly and bobbed awkward
little bows. One was very tall, the other rather short. The tall one
looked extraordinarily severe and the short one extraordinarily glum,
Mark thought, to have young men. Mabel looked from the girls to Mark and
from Mark to the girls, precisely as if she were exhibiting rare
specimens to her husband and her husband to her rare specimens. And in
the tone of one exhibiting pinned, dried, and completely impersonal
specimens, she announced, "They're sisters. Their name is Jinks."

Mark, examining the exhibits, had been feeling like a fool. Their name
humanized them and relieved his awkward feeling. "Ha! Jinks, eh? High
Jinks and Low Jinks, what?" He laughed. It struck him as rather comic;
and High Jinks and Low Jinks tittered broadly, losing in the most
astonishing way the one her severity and the other her glumness.

Mabel seemed suddenly to have lost her interest in her exhibits and