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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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and seemed to consider them born for no earthly purpose but to “save her steps,” as she phrased it. It was the spirit of the system under which she had grown up, and she carried it out to its full extent. Miss Ophelia, after passing on her reformatory tour through all the other parts of the establishment, now entered the kitchen. Dinah had heard, from various sources, what was going on, and resolved to stand on defensive and conservative ground, mentally determined to oppose and ignore every new measure, without any actual and observable contest. The kitchen was a large brick-floored apartment, with a great old-fashioned fireplace stretching along one side of it,- an arrangement which St. Clare had vainly tried to persuade Dinah to exchange for the convenience of a modern cook- stove. Not she. No Puseyite, or conservative of any school, was ever more inflex- ibly attached to time-honored inconveniences than Dinah. When St. Clare had first returned from the north, impressed with the system and order of his uncle’s kitchen arrangements, he had largely provided his own with an array of cupboards, drawers, and various apparatus, to induce systematic regulation, under the sanguine illusion that it would be of any possible assistance to Dinah in her arrangements. He might as well have provided them for a squirrel or a magpie. The more drawers and closets there were, the more hiding-holes could Dinah make for the accommodation of old rags, hair-combs, old shoes, rib- bons, cast-off artificial flowers, and other articles of vertu wherein her soul de- lighted. |
