and for Spanish quince-paste. I bossed the old Basque woman we had for
cook and learned how to cook from her, using a great many onions for
everything. And I learned how to keep house by the light of nature,
since it had to be done. And I'm awfully excited about having a house of
my own, just as though I weren't the extremely clever, cynical,
disillusioned, fascinating musical genius everybody knows me to be: only
let me warn you that the old house we are going to live in will need
lots done to it. Your uncle never opened the dreadful room he called the
parlor, and never used the south wing at all, where all the sunshine
comes in. And the pantry arrangements are simply humorous, they're so
inadequate. I don't know how much of that four thousand dollars you are
going to want to spare for remodeling the mill, but I will tell you
now, that I will go on strike if you don't give me a better cook-stove
than your Uncle's Touclé had to work with."

He had been listening with an appreciative grin to her nimble-witted
chatter, but at this he brought her up short by an astonished, "Who had?
What had? What's that . . . Touclé?"

She laughed aloud again, delighted at having startled him into
curiosity. "Touclé. Touclé. Don't you think it a pretty name? Will you
believe me when I say I know all about Ashley?"

"Oh, go on, tell me!" he begged. "You don't mean to say that my Uncle
Benton had pep enough to have a scandal in his life?"

"What do _you_ know about your uncle?"

"Oh, I'd seen him a few times, though I'd never been up to Ashley. As
long as Grandfather was alive and the mill at Adams Center was running,