as peeling potatoes for
dinner, and she snuggled her yellow curls on my shoulder kind of
apologetically for the mess she had caused me. I scrubbed the soot and
oil off my hands and told her it was all right, only next time, for
gosh sakes, please turn the stove off at least.

The water I was splashing into the roaster gathered up in little
shrinking drops and reminded me that the pig-hocks I brought home for
Sunday dinner were going to rate throwing out unless we got the oil
smell out of the pan.

"Tell you what you do," I said to Lottie. "Get me all your cleaning
soaps and stuff and let's see what we got."

Lottie is always trying out some new handy-dandy little kitchen helper
compound, so she hefted up quite an armload. Now, when I was in high
school, I really liked chemistry. "Charlie, Boy Scientist," my pals
used to sneer at me. But I was pretty good at it, and I been reading
the science magazines right along ever since. So I know what a
detergent is supposed to do, and all about how soaps act, and stuff
that most people take the advertisers' word for.

"This one," I told Lottie, "has a lot of caustic in it, see?"

She nodded and said that's the one that ruined her aluminum coffee
pot. She remembered it specially.

I poured some very hot tap water into the roaster and shook in the
strong soap powder. "This is to saponify the oil," I explained.

"What's saponify?" Lottie asked.

"That means to make soap. Soap is mainly a mixture of some caustic
with fat or oil. It makes sudsy soap."

"But we got soap," she said. "Why don't you just use the soap we got?"

We went into the business of soap-making pretty deep. Meanwhile, I
read some more labels and added pinches of this and that detergent and
a few squirts of liquid "wonder-cleaners" that didn't say what was in
them.

In her crisp Scotch way, Lottie got across to me that she thought I
was wasting soap powder and my time and cluttering up the sink while
she was busy there, so I wound up with half a cup of Doozey soap
flakes, filled the pan to the brim and set the concoction at the back
of the drain board to do its business.

* * * * *

When dinner was over, I was in the living room reading the paper when
I heard Lottie muttering at the sink. Lottie doesn't usually mutter,
so I went out to see what was wrong.

"Nice mess," she said and pointed at the roaster. The stuff had cooled
and jelled into a half-solid condition.

"