Beth, whom she supposed to be Aunt Grace Mary's
agent; but she very much enjoyed every addition to her monotonous
diet, especially when Beth did the cooking. In fact, had it not been
for Loyal Heart, the family would have pretty nearly starved that
winter, because of Jim, who had contracted debts like a man, which his
mother had to pay.

With regard to Beth's cooking, it is remarkable that, although Mrs.
Caldwell herself had suffered all through her married life for want of
proper training in household matters, she never attempted to have her
own daughters better taught. On the contrary, she had forbidden Beth
to do servant's work, and objected most strongly to her cooking, until
she found how good it was, and even then she thought it due to her
position only to countenance it under protest. The extraordinary
inefficiency of the good-old-fashioned-womanly woman as a wife on a
small income, the silly pretences which showed her want of proper
self-respect, and the ill-adjusted balance of her undeveloped mind
which betrayed itself in petty inconsistencies, fill us with pity and
surprise us, yet encourage us too by proving how right and wise we
were to try our own experiments. If we had listened to advice and done
as we were told, the woman's-sphere-is-home would have been as ugly
and comfortless a place for us to-day as it used to be when Beth was
forced by the needs of her nature to poach for diversion, cook for
kindness, and clean, and fight, and pray, and lie, and love, in her
brave struggle against the hard and stupid conditions of her
life--conditions which were not only retarding the development, but
threatening utterly to distort, if not actually to destroy, all that
was best, most beautiful, and most wonderful in her character.

Beth rather expected to get into difficulties eventually about the
game, but she calculated that she would have a certain time to run
before her head was snapped off, and during that time her mother would
enjoy her good dinners and be the better for them, and she herself
would enjoy the sport--facts which no amount of anger afterwards could
alter. Since Mrs. Caldwell had washed her hands of Beth, they were
beginning to be quite good friends. Sometimes her mother talked to her
just as she would to anybody else; that is to say, with civility. She
would say, "And what are you going to do to-day, Beth?" quite
pleasantly, as though speaking to another grown-up person; and Beth
would answer pol