Come out of the Kitchen! by Alice Duer Miller

ONCE in the little office, Crane did not immediately speak. He drew up two chairs, put a log on the fire, turned up the lamp, and in short made it evident that he intended to do that cruel deed sometimes perpetrated by parents, guardians and schoolmasters in interviews of this sort -- he was going to leave it to the culprit to make a beginning.

Reed, fidgeting in a nearby chair, did not at once yield to this compulsion, but finally the calm with which Crane was balancing a pen on a pencil broke down his resolution and he said crossly: