The Brimming Cup | Page 8

that gloomy-minded ticket-seller back of us who already has his
suspicions."
She rose instantly to the possibilities and said smoothly, swiftly,
whimsically, with the accent of drollery, "I'm very particular about
what sort of frying-pan I use. I insist on having a separate one for the
fritures of fish, and another for the omelets, used only for that: I'm a
very fine and conscientious housekeeper, I'd have you know, and all the
while we lived in Bayonne I ran the house because Mother never got
used to French housekeeping ways. I was the one who went to

market . . . oh, the gorgeous things you get in the Bayonne market, near
enough Spain, you know, for real Malaga grapes with the aroma still on
them, 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, Uncle Burton used to go there to see his father, and I always
used to be hanging around Grandfather and the mill, and the woods. I
was crazy about it all, as a boy, used to work right along with the
mill-hands, and out chopping with the lumbermen. Maybe Uncle
Burton noticed that." He was struck with a sudden idea, "By George,
maybe that was why he left me the mill!" He cast his eye

retrospectively on this idea and was silent for a moment, emerging
from his meditation to say, wonderingly, "Well, it certainly is queer,
how things come out, how one thing hangs on another. It's enough to
addle your brains, to try to start to follow back all the ways things
happen . . . ways you'd never thought of as of the least importance."
"Your Uncle Burton was of some importance to us," she told him.
"Miss Oldham at the pension said that she had just met a new American,
down from Genoa, and when I heard your name I said, 'Oh, I used to
know an old Mr. Crittenden who ran a wood-working factory up in
Vermont, where I used to visit an old cousin of mine,' and that was why
Miss Oldham introduced us, that silly way, as cousins."
He said, pouncingly, "You're running on, inconsequently, just to divert
my mind from asking you again who or what Touclé is."
"You can ask and ask all you like," she defied him, laughing. "I'm not
going to tell you. I've got to have some secrets from you, to keep up the
traditions of self-respecting womanhood. And anyhow I couldn't tell
you, because she is different from everything else. You'll see for
yourself, when we get there. If she's still alive." She offered a
compromise, "I'll tell you what. If she's dead, I'll sit down and tell you
about her. If she's still alive, you'll find out. She's an Ashley institution,
Touclé is. As symbolic as the Cumean Sybil. I don't believe she'll be
dead. I don't believe she'll ever be dead."
"You've let the cat out of the bag enough so I've lost my interest in
her," he professed. "I can make a guess that