At three o'clock the heat arrives like a curse. In the small, fiery kitchen, where the hired cook has been at work all day, Mrs. Adams presses her husband's old evening clothes with a hot iron. She nearly faints carrying them upstairs, gropes along the wall to her bureau for a restorative, and goes back to work smiling. Alice is scrubbing the woodwork again. She tells her mother it makes her ashamed to see her work so hard, and for her. Walter has not come home, and they cannot telephone him at Lamb's. Then the hired waitress, Gertrude, arrives at the front door with a small bundle under her arm and a jaw that never stops chewing.
Gertrude's eyes are bloodshot, her cap slides sideways and her skirt hangs unevenly, but it is too late to find anyone else. Alice puts on the white organdie she wore the night she met Russell. Her mother says she looks as if she were in a trance. Her father comes in wearing the pressed clothes, which hang on him like a larger man's, and a shirt whose buttonhole will not hold. He sniffs the air. Not glue this time: is cabbage fashionable for company? It is Brussels sprouts. Alice is sewing the buttonhole when the doorbell rings. At the same moment a crash comes from below. Gertrude has fallen down the cellar stairs over the bucket Alice left on the top step.
Mrs. Adams opens the door herself, explaining that their housemaid has had a little accident. She sits in one of the plush rockers, because Alice once said they look less awful with someone in them. Russell is grave and pale. When she says the house is cooler than outdoors, he agrees, a single untruth. Then, laughing all the while to sound cordial, she tells him about Alice for half an hour: her character, her modesty, her school prizes, the half-dozen boys who wanted to marry her at sixteen. He must not tell Alice. He promises, mopping his forehead. She is like an actor improvising while the rest of the cast misses its cues.
In the dining-room Alice keeps rearranging the wilting roses, moves the best-plated forks and spoons to Russell's place, and wishes they had rented silver. She will not go in by the dining-room door, so her puzzled father follows her round by the back stairs. At the top of the front stairs she takes a breath and is transformed: head up, eyes sparkling, humming. She sweeps down with her hand held out, stands between Russell and her father so they cannot shake hands, and chatters about papa's terrible old factory. Gertrude offers Adams a damp caviar sandwich, which he tastes and cannot get rid of. As they go in to dinner he drops it in the empty fireplace. Only Alice sees. He looks at her as if to say he is doing his best, and she smiles at him sunnily.
Coming Up in Chapter 22
At the table the soup is hot, the roses are dying and the smell of Brussels sprouts fills the little room. Alice keeps up a bright stream of chatter about the devil moving the equator, while the waitress leans against the wall, chin moving slowly, and ignores every signal to clear the soup.
