"It was only airs," she thought, when at noon Ethelyn declined the boiled beef and cabbage, saying just the odor of it made her sick.
"Nothing but airs and ugliness," she persisted in saying to herself, as she prepared a slice of nice cream toast with a soft-boiled egg and cup of fragrant black tea.

Ethie did not refuse this, and was even gracious enough to thank her mother-in-law for her extra trouble, but she did it in such a queenly as well as injured kind of way, that Mrs.Markham felt more aggrieved than ever, and, for a good woman, who sometimes spoke in meeting, slammed the door considerably hard as she left the room and went back to her kitchen, where the table had been laid ever since Ethelyn took to eating upstairs.

So long as she ate with the family Mrs.
Markham felt rather obliged to take her meals in the front room, but it made a deal more work, and she was glad to return to her olden ways once more.

Eunice was gone off on an errand, and so she felt at liberty to speak her mind freely to her boys as they gathered around the table.
"It is sheer ugliness," she said, "which keeps her cooped up there to be waited on.

She is no more sick than the dog; but law, I couldn't make Richard b'lieve it." "Mother, you surely did not go to Richard with complaints of his wife," and James looked reproachfully across the table at his mother, who replied: "I told him what I thought, for I wa'n't going to have him miserable all the time thinking how sick she was, but I might as well have talked to the wind, for any good it did.