If you want to dress I'll hook you up." "I'm too tired to go up and dress," and Betty's voice did sound very weary.

There was a despondent note in it, too, which surprised the man standing in the kitchen.

Excepting during the few moments, to him intensely moving and solemn moments, when they had spoken of George within a day or two of his return to Beechfield, he had always seen Betty extraordinarily cheerful.
"You can go just as you are," he heard Timmy say eagerly.

"You could pretend you'd just been to a fancy ball as a cook!" He added, patronizingly, "If you put on a clean apron, you'll look quite nice." Radmore did not catch the answer, but he gathered that it was again in the negative, and a moment later Timmy's little feet scampered up the uncarpeted flight of stairs which led into the upper part of the house.
Walking forward, he quietly pushed open the scullery door, and for some seconds he stood unseen, taking in the far from unattractive scene before him.
The scullery of Old Place was a glorified kind of scullery, for, just before the War, Janet had spent a little of her own money on "doing it up." Since then she had often congratulated herself on the fact that in the days when the process was comparatively cheap, she had had the scullery walls lined five feet up with black and white tiles matching the linoleum which covered the stone floor.
Against this background Betty Tosswill was now standing, a trim, neat figure, in her pink cotton gown and big white apron.

She was engaged in washing, drying, and polishing the fine old table glass which had been used that evening.
It was such a relief to her to be alone at last! For one thing, though Timmy and Tom both loved her dearly, their love never suggested to them that it must be disagreeable to her to hear them constantly bickering the one with the other, and they would have been surprised indeed had they known how their teasing squabbles had added to the strain and fatigue of serving the elaborate dinner she had just cooked.
She felt spent, in body and in mind, and in the mood when a woman craves, above all things, for solitude.
"Look here, Betty, can't I do anything to help ?" She started violently, and gave a little cry, while the stem of the wine-glass she held in her hand snapped in two.