! I thought you were going to a party, you're so dressy."

In the beginning Lil had offered to allow Ma Mandle to continue with the
marketing but Mrs. Mandle had declined, acidly. "Oh, no," she had said.
"This is your household now."

But she never failed to inspect the groceries as they lay on the kitchen
table after delivery. She would press a wise and disdainful thumb into a
head of lettuce; poke a pot-roast with disapproving finger; turn a plump
chicken over and thump it down with a look that was pregnant with
meaning.

Ma Mandle disapproved of many things. Of Lil's silken, lacy lingerie; of
her social activities; of what she termed her wastefulness. Lil wore the
fewest possible undergarments, according to the fashion of the day, and
she worried, good-naturedly, about additional plumpness that was the
result of leisure and of rich food. She was addicted to afternoon
parties at the homes of married women of her own age and
station--pretty, well-dressed, over-indulged women who regularly ate too
much. They served a mayonnaise chicken salad, and little hot buttery
biscuits, and strong coffee with sugar and cream, and there were dishes
of salted almonds, and great, shining, oily, black ripe olives, and a
heavy, rich dessert. When she came home she ate nothing.

"I couldn't eat a bite of dinner," she would say. "Let me tell you what
we had." She would come to the table in one of her silken, lace-bedecked
teagowns and talk animatedly to Hugo while he ate his dinner and eyed
her appreciatively as she sat there leaning one elbow on the cloth, the
sleeve fallen back so that you saw her plump white forearm. She kept her
clear, rosy skin in spite of the pastry and sweets and the indolent
life, and even the layers of powder with which she was forever dabbing
her face had not coarsened its texture.

Hugo, man-like, was unconscious of the undercurrent of animosity between
the two women. He was very happy. He only knew that Lil understood about
cigar ashes; that she didn't mind if a pillow wasn't plumped and patted
after his Sunday nap on the davenport; that she never complained to him
about the shortcomings of the little Swede, as Ma Mandle had about
Polish Anna. Even at house-cleaning time, which Ma Mandle had always
treated as a scourge, things were as smooth-running and peaceful as at
ordinary times. Just a little bare, perhaps, as to floors, and smelling
of cleanliness. Lil applied businesslike methods to the conduct of h