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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Treasure, by Kathleen Norris
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Treasure
+
+Author: Kathleen Norris
+
+Posting Date: July 7, 2009 [EBook #4211]
+Release Date: July, 2003
+First Posted: December 11, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TREASURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TREASURE
+
+KATHLEEN NORRIS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Lizzie, who happened to be the Salisbury's one servant at the time, was
+wasteful. It was almost her only fault, in Mrs. Salisbury's eyes, for
+such trifles as her habit of becoming excited and "saucy," in moments
+of domestic stress, or to ask boldly for other holidays than her
+alternate Sunday and Thursday afternoons, or to resent at all times the
+intrusion of any person, even her mistress, into her immaculate
+kitchen, might have been overlooked. Mrs. Salisbury had been keeping
+house in a suburban town for twenty years; she was not considered an
+exacting mistress. She was perfectly willing to forgive Lizzie what was
+said in the hurried hours before the company dinner or impromptu lunch,
+and to let Lizzie slip out for a walk with her sister in the evening,
+and to keep out of the kitchen herself as much as was possible. So much
+might be conceded to a girl who was honest and clean, industrious,
+respectable, and a fair cook.
+
+But the wastefulness was a serious matter. Mrs. Salisbury was a careful
+and an experienced manager; she resented waste; indeed, she could not
+afford to tolerate it. She liked to go into the kitchen herself every
+morning, to eye the contents of icebox and pantry, and decide upon
+needed stores. Enough butter, enough cold meat for dinner, enough milk
+for a nourishing soup, eggs and salad for luncheon--what about potatoes?
+
+Lizzie deliberately frustrated this house-wifely ambition. She flounced
+and muttered when other hands than her own were laid upon her icebox.
+She turned on rushing faucets, rattled dishes in her pan. Yet Mrs.
+Salisbury felt that she must personally superintend these matters,
+because Lizzie was so wasteful. The girl had not been three months in
+the Salisbury family before all bills for supplies soared alarmingly.
+
+This was all wrong. Mrs. Salisbury fretted over it a few weeks, then
+confided her concern to her husband. But Kane Salisbury would not
+listen to the details. He scowled at the introduction of the topic,
+glanced restlessly at his paper, murmured that Lizzie might be "fired";
+and, when Mrs. Salisbury had resolutely bottled up her seething
+discontent inside of herself, she sometimes heard him murmuring,
+"Bad--bad--management" as he sat chewing his pipe-stem on the dark
+porch or beside the fire.
+
+Alexandra, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the house, was equally
+incurious and unreasonable about domestic details.
+
+"But, honestly, Mother, you know you're afraid of Lizzie, and she knows
+it," Alexandra would declare gaily; "I can't tell you how I'd manage
+her, because she's not my servant, but I know I would do something!"
+
+Beauty and intelligence gave Alexandra, even at eighteen, a certain
+serene poise and self-reliance that lifted her above the old-fashioned
+topics of "trouble with girls," and housekeeping, and marketing.
+Alexandra touched these subjects under the titles of "budgets,"
+"domestic science," and "efficiency." Neither she nor her mother
+recognized the old, homely subjects under their new names, and so the
+daughter felt a lack of interest, and the mother a lack of sympathy,
+that kept them from understanding each other. Alexandra, ready to meet
+and conquer all the troubles of a badly managed world, felt that one
+small home did not present a very terrible problem. Poor Mrs. Salisbury
+only knew that it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep a general
+servant at all in a family of five, and that her husband's salary, of
+something a little less than four thousand dollars a year, did not at
+all seem the princely sum that they would have thought it when they
+were married on twenty dollars a week.
+
+From the younger members of the family, Fred, who was fifteen, and
+Stanford, three years younger, she expected, and got, no sympathy. The
+three young Salisburys found money interesting only when they needed it
+for new gowns, or matinee tickets, or tennis rackets, or some kindred
+purchase. They needed it desperately, asked for it, got it, spent it,
+and gave it no further thought. It meant nothing to them that Lizzie
+was wasteful. It was only to their mother that the girl's slipshod ways
+were becoming an absolute trial.
+
+Lizzie, very neat and respectful, would interfere with Mrs. Salisbury's
+plan of a visit to the kitchen by appearing to ask for instructions
+before breakfast was fairly over. When the man of the house had gone,
+and before the children appeared, Lizzie would inquire:
+
+"Just yourselves for dinner, Mrs. Salisbury?"
+
+"Just ourselves. Let--me--see--" Mrs. Salisbury would lay down her
+newspaper, stir her cooling coffee. The memory of last night's
+vegetables would rise before her; there must be baked onions left, and
+some of the corn.
+
+"There was some lamb left, wasn't there?" she might ask.
+
+Amazement on Lizzie's part.
+
+"That wasn't such an awful big leg, Mrs. Salisbury. And the boys had
+Perry White in, you know. There's just a little plateful left. I gave
+Sam the bones."
+
+Mrs. Salisbury could imagine the plateful: small, neat, cold.
+
+"Sometimes I think that if you left the joint on the platter, Lizzie,
+there are scrapings, you know--" she might suggest.
+
+"I scraped it," Lizzie would answer briefly, conclusively.
+
+"Well, that for lunch, then, for Miss Sandy and me," Mrs. Salisbury
+would decide hastily. "I'll order something fresh for dinner. Were
+there any vegetables left?"
+
+"There were a few potatoes, enough for lunch," Lizzie would admit
+guardedly.
+
+"I'll order vegetables, too, then!" And Mrs. Salisbury would sigh.
+Every housekeeper knows that there is no economy in ordering afresh for
+every meal.
+
+"And we need butter--"
+
+"Butter again! Those two pounds gone?"
+
+"There's a little piece left, not enough, though. And I'm on my last
+cake of soap, and we need crackers, and vanilla, and sugar, unless
+you're not going to have a dessert, and salad oil--"
+
+"Just get me a pencil, will you?" This was as usual. Mrs. Salisbury
+would pencil a long list, would bite her lips thoughtfully, and sigh as
+she read it over.
+
+"Asparagus to-night, then. And, Lizzie, don't serve so much melted
+butter with it as you did last time; there must have been a cupful of
+melted butter. And, another time, save what little scraps of vegetables
+there are left; they help out so at lunch--"
+
+"There wasn't a saucerful of onions left last night," Lizzie would
+assert, "and two cobs of corn, after I'd had my dinner. You couldn't do
+much with those. And, as for butter on the asparagus"--Lizzie was very
+respectful, but her tone would rise aggrievedly--"it was every bit
+eaten, Mrs. Salisbury!"
+
+"Yes, I know. But we mustn't let these young vandals eat us out of
+house and home, you know," the mistress would say, feeling as if she
+were doing something contemptibly small. And, worsted, she would return
+to her paper. "But I don't care, we cannot afford it!" Mrs. Salisbury
+would say to herself, when Lizzie had gone, and very thoughtfully she
+would write out a check payable to "cash." "I used to use up little
+odds and ends so deliciously, years ago!" she sometimes reflected
+disconsolately. "And Kane always says we never live as well now as we
+did then! He always praised my dinners."
+
+Nowadays Mr. Salisbury was not so well satisfied. Lizzie rang the
+changes upon roasted and fried meats, boiled and creamed vegetables,
+baked puddings and canned fruits contentedly enough. She made cup cake
+and sponge cake, sponge cake and cup cake all the year round. Nothing
+was ever changed, no unexpected flavor ever surprised the palates of
+the Salisbury family. May brought strawberry shortcake, December
+cottage puddings, cold beef always made a stew; creamed codfish was
+never served without baked potatoes. The Salisbury table was a
+duplicate of some millions of other tables, scattered the length and
+breadth of the land.
+
+"And still the bills go up!" fretted Mrs. Salisbury.
+
+"Well, why don't you fire her, Sally?" her husband asked, as he had
+asked of almost every maid they had ever had--of lazy Annies, and
+untidy Selmas, and ignorant Katies. And, as always, Mrs. Salisbury
+answered patiently:
+
+"Oh, Kane, what's the use? It simply means my going to Miss Crosby's
+again, and facing that awful row of them, and beginning that I have
+three grown children, and no other help--"
+
+"Mother, have you ever had a perfect maid?" Sandy had asked earnestly
+years before. Her mother spent a moment in reflection, arresting the
+hand with which she was polishing silver. Alexandra was only sixteen
+then, and mother and daughter were bridging a gap when there was no
+maid at all in the Salisbury kitchen.
+
+"Well, there was Libby," the mother answered at length, "the colored
+girl I had when you were born. She really was perfect, in a way. She
+was a clean darky, and such a cook! Daddy talks still of her fried
+chicken and blueberry pies! And she loved company, too. But, you see,
+Grandma Salisbury was with us then, and she paid a little girl to look
+after you, so Libby had really nothing but the kitchen and dining-room
+to care for. Afterward, just before Fred came, she got lazy and ugly,
+and I had to let her go. Canadian Annie was a wonderful girl, too,"
+pursued Mrs. Salisbury, "but we only had her two months. Then she got a
+place where there were no children, and left on two days' notice. And
+when I think of the others!--the Hungarian girl who boiled two pairs of
+Fred's little brown socks and darkened the entire wash, sheets and
+napkins and all! And the colored girl who drank, and the girl who gave
+us boiled rice for dessert whenever I forgot to tell her anything else!
+And then Dad and I never will forget the woman who put pudding sauce on
+his mutton--dear me, dear me!" And Mrs. Salisbury laughed out at the
+memory. "Between her not knowing one thing, and not understanding a
+word we said, she was pretty trying all around!" she presently added.
+"And, of course, the instant you have them really trained they leave;
+and that's the end of that! One left me the day Stan was born, and
+another--and she was a nice girl, too--simply departed when you three
+were all down with scarlet fever, and left her bed unmade, and the tea
+cup and saucer from her breakfast on the end of the kitchen table!
+Luckily we had a wonderful nurse, and she simply took hold and saved
+the day."
+
+"Isn't it a wonder that there isn't a training school for house
+servants?" Sandy had inquired, youthful interest in her eye.
+
+"There's no such thing," her mother assured her positively, "as getting
+one who knows her business! And why? Why, because all the smart girls
+prefer to go into factories, and slave away for three or four dollars a
+week, instead of coming into good homes! Do Pearsall and Thompson ever
+have any difficulty in getting girls for the glove factory? Never!
+There's a line of them waiting, a block long, every time they
+advertise. But you may make up your mind to it, dear, if you get a good
+cook, she's wasteful or she's lazy, or she's irritable, or dirty, or
+she won't wait on table, or she slips out at night, and laughs under
+street lamps with some man or other! She's always on your mind, and
+she's always an irritation."
+
+"It just shows what a hopelessly stupid class you have to deal with,
+Mother," the younger Sandy had said. But at eighteen, she was not so
+sure.
+
+Alexandra frankly hated housework, and she did not know how to cook.
+She did not think it strange that it was hard to find a clever and
+well-trained young woman who would gladly spend all her time in
+housework and cooking for something less than three hundred dollars a
+year. Her eyes were beginning to be opened to the immense moral and
+social questions that lie behind the simple preference of American
+girls to work for men rather than for women. Household work was women's
+sphere, Sandy reasoned, and they had made it a sphere insufferable to
+other women. Something was wrong.
+
+Sandy was too young, and too mentally independent, to enter very
+sympathetically into her mother's side of the matter. The younger
+woman's attitude was tinged with affectionate contempt, and when the
+stupidity of the maid, or the inconvenience of having no maid at all,
+interfered with the smooth current of her life, or her busy comings and
+goings, she became impatient and intolerant.
+
+"Other people manage!" said Alexandra.
+
+"Who, for instance?" demanded her mother, in calm exasperation.
+
+"Oh, everyone--the Bernards, the Watermans! Doilies and finger bowls,
+and Elsie in a cap and apron!"
+
+"But Doctor and Mrs. Bernard are old people, dear, and the Watermans
+are three business women--no lunch, no children, very little company!"
+
+"Well, Grace Elliot, then!"
+
+"With two maids, Sandy. That's a very different matter!"
+
+"And is there any reason why we shouldn't have two?" asked Sandy, with
+youthful logic.
+
+"Ah, well, there you come to the question of expense, dear!" And Mrs.
+Salisbury dismissed the subject with a quiet air of triumph.
+
+But of course the topic came up again. It is the one household ghost
+that is never laid in such a family. Sometimes Kane Salisbury himself
+took a part in it.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me," he once demanded, in the days of the
+dreadfully incompetent maids who preceded Lizzie, "that it is becoming
+practically impossible to get a good general servant?"
+
+"Well, I wish you'd try it yourself," his wife answered, grimly quiet.
+"It's just about wearing me out! I don't know what has become of the
+good old maid-of-all-work," she presently pursued, with a sigh, "but
+she has simply vanished from the face of the earth. Even the greenest
+girls fresh from the other side begin to talk about having the washing
+put out, and to have extra help come in to wash windows and beat rugs!
+I don't know what we're coming to--you teach them to tell a blanket
+from a sheet, and how to boil coffee, and set a table, and then away
+they go to get more money somewhere. Dear me! Your father's mother used
+to have girls who had the wash on the line before eight o'clock--"
+
+"Yes, but then Grandma's house was simpler," Sandy contributed, a
+little doubtfully. "You know, Grandma never put on any style, Mother--"
+
+"Her house was always one of the most comfortable, most hospitable--"
+
+"Yes, I know, Mother!" Alexandra persisted eagerly. "But Fanny never
+had to answer the door, and Grandma used to let her leave the
+tablecloth on between meals--Grandma told me so herself!--and no
+fussing with doilies, or service plates under the soup plates, or glass
+saucers for dessert. And Grandma herself used to help wipe dishes, or
+sometimes set the table, and make the beds, if there was company--"
+
+"That may be," Mrs. Salisbury had the satisfaction of answering coldly.
+"Perhaps she did, although _I_ never remember hearing her say so. But
+my mother always had colored servants, and I never saw her so much as
+dust the piano!"
+
+"I suppose we couldn't simplify things, Sally? Cut out some of the
+extra touches?" suggested the head of the house.
+
+Mrs. Salisbury merely shook her head, compressing her lips firmly. It
+was quite difficult enough to keep things "nice," with two growing boys
+in the family, without encountering such opposition as this. A day or
+two later she went into New Troy, the nearest big city, and came back
+triumphantly with Lizzie.
+
+And at first Lizzie really did seem perfection. It was some weeks
+before Mrs. Salisbury realized that Lizzie was not truthful; absolutely
+reliable in money matters, yet Lizzie could not be believed in the
+simplest statement. Tasteless oatmeal, Lizzie glibly asseverated, had
+been well salted; weak coffee, or coffee as strong as brown paint, were
+the fault of the pot. Lizzie, rushing through dinner so that she might
+get out; Lizzie throwing out cold vegetables that "weren't worth
+saving"; Lizzie growing snappy and noisy at the first hint of
+criticism, somehow seemed worse sometimes than no servant at all.
+
+"I wonder--if we moved into New Troy, Kane," Mrs. Salisbury mused, "and
+got one of those wonderful modern apartments, with a gas stove, and a
+dumbwaiter, and hardwood floors, if Sandy and I couldn't manage
+everything? With a woman to clean and dinners downtown now and then,
+and a waitress in for occasions."
+
+"And me jumping up to change the salad plates, Mother!" Alexandra put
+in briskly. "And a pile of dishes to do every night!"
+
+"Gosh, let's not move into the city--" protested Stanford. "No tennis,
+no canoe, no baseball!"
+
+"And we know everyone in River Falls, we'd have to keep coming out here
+for parties!" Sandy added.
+
+"Well," Mrs. Salisbury sighed, "I admit that it is too much of a
+problem for me!" she said. "I know that I married your father on twenty
+dollars a week," she told the children severely, "and we lived in a
+dear little cottage, only eighteen dollars a month, and I did all my
+own work! And never in our lives have we lived so well. But the minute
+you get inexperienced help, your bills simply double, and inexperienced
+help means simply one annoyance after another. I give it up!"
+
+"Well, I'll tell you, Mother," Alexandra offered innocently; "perhaps
+we don't systematize enough ourselves. It ought to be all so well
+arranged and regulated that a girl would know what she was expected to
+do, and know that you had a perfect right to call her down for wasting
+or slighting things. Why couldn't women--a bunch of women, say--"
+
+"Why couldn't they form a set of household rules and regulations?" her
+mother intercepted smoothly. "Because--it's just one of the things that
+you young, inexperienced people can talk very easily about," she
+interrupted herself to say with feeling, "but it never seems to occur
+to any one of you that every household has its different demands and
+regulations. The market fluctuates, the size of a family changes--fixed
+laws are impossible! No. Lizzie is no worse than lots of others, better
+than the average. I shall hold on to her!"
+
+"Mrs. Sargent says that all these unnecessary demands have been
+instituted and insisted upon by women," said Alexandra. "She says that
+the secret of the whole trouble is that women try to live above their
+class, and make one servant appear to do the work of three--"
+
+The introduction of Mrs. Sargent's name was not a happy one.
+
+"Ellen Sargent," said Mrs. Salisbury icily, "is not a lady herself, in
+the true sense of the word, and she does very well to talk about class
+distinctions! She was his stenographer when Cyrus Sargent married her,
+and the daughter of a tannery hand. Now, just because she has millions,
+I am not going to be impressed by anything Ellen Sargent does or says!"
+
+"Mother, I don't think she meant quality by 'class,'" Sandy protested.
+"Everyone knows that Grandfather was General Stanford, and all that!
+But I think she meant, in a way, the money side of it, the financial
+division of people into classes!"
+
+"We won't discuss her," decided Mrs. Salisbury majestically. "The money
+standard is one I am not anxious to judge my friends by!"
+
+Still, with the rest of the family, Mrs. Salisbury was relieved when
+Lizzie, shortly after this, decided of her own accord to accept a
+better-paid position. "Unless, Mama says, you'd care to raise me to
+seven a week," said Lizzie, in parting.
+
+"No, no, I cannot pay that," Mrs. Salisbury said firmly and Lizzie
+accordingly left.
+
+Her place was taken by a middle-aged French woman, and whipped cream
+and the subtle flavor of sherry began to appear in the Salisbury bills
+of fare. Germaine had no idea whatever of time, and Sandy perforce must
+set the table whenever there was a company dinner afoot, and lend a
+hand with the last preparations as well. The kitchen was never really
+in order in these days, but Germaine cooked deliciously, and Mrs.
+Salisbury gave eight dinners and a club luncheon during the month of
+her reign. Then the French woman grew more and more irregular as to
+hours, and more utterly unreliable as to meals; sometimes the family
+fared delightfully, sometimes there was almost nothing for dinner.
+Germaine seemed to fade from sight, not entirely of her own volition,
+not really discharged; simply she was gone. A Norwegian girl came next,
+a good-natured, blundering creature whose English was just enough to
+utterly confuse herself and everyone else. Freda's mistakes were not
+half so funny in the making as Alexandra made them in anecdotes
+afterward; and Freda was given to weird chanting, accompanying herself
+with a banjo, throughout the evenings. Finally a blonde giant known as
+"Freda's cousin" came to see her, and Kane Salisbury, followed by his
+elated and excited boys, had to eject Freda's cousin early in the
+evening, while Freda wept and chattered to the ladies of the house.
+After that the cousin called often to ask for her, but Freda had
+vanished the day after this event, and the Salisburys never heard of
+her again.
+
+They tried another Norwegian, then a Polack, then a Scandinavian. Then
+they had a German man and wife for a week, a couple who asserted that
+they would work, without pay, for a good home. This was a most
+uncomfortable experience, unsuccessful from the first instant. Then
+came a low-voiced, good-natured South American negress, Marthe, not
+much of a cook, but willing and strong.
+
+July was mercilessly hot that year, thirty-one burning days of
+sunshine. Mrs. Salisbury was not a very strong woman, and she had a
+great many visitors to entertain. She kept Marthe, because the colored
+woman did not resent constant supervision, and an almost hourly change
+of plans. Mrs. Salisbury did almost all of the cooking herself, fussing
+for hours in the hot kitchen over the cold meats and salads and ices
+that formed the little informal cold suppers to which the Salisburys
+loved to ask their friends on Saturday and Sunday nights.
+
+Alexandra helped fitfully. She would put her pretty head into the
+kitchen doorway, perhaps to find her mother icing cake.
+
+"Listen, Mother; I'm going over to Con's. She's got that new serve down
+to a fine point! And I've done the boys' room and the guest room; it's
+all ready for the Cutters. And I put towels and soap in the bathroom,
+only you'll have to have Marthe wipe up the floor and the tub."
+
+"You're a darling child," the mother would say gratefully.
+
+"Darling nothing!" And Sandy, with her protest, would lay a cool cheek
+against her mother's hot one. "Do you have to stay out here, Mother?"
+she would ask resentfully. "Can't the Culled Lady do this?"
+
+"Well, I left her to watch it, and it burned," Mrs. Salisbury would
+say, "so now it has to be pared and frosted. Such a bother! But this is
+the very last thing, dear. You run along; I'll be out of here in two
+minutes!"
+
+But it was always something more than two minutes. Sometimes even Kane
+Salisbury was led to protest.
+
+"Can't we eat less, dear? Or differently? Isn't there some simple way
+of managing this week-end supper business? Now, Brewer--Brewer manages
+it awfully well. He has his man set out a big cold roast or two,
+cheese, and coffee, and a bowlful of salad, and beer. He'll get a fruit
+pie from the club sometimes, or pastries, or a pot of marmalade--"
+
+"Yes, indeed, we must try to simplify," Mrs. Salisbury would agree
+brightly. But after such a conversation as this she would go over her
+accounts very soberly indeed. "Roasts--cheeses--fruit pies!" she would
+say bitterly to herself. "Why is it that a man will spend as much on a
+single lunch for his friends as a woman is supposed to spend on her
+table for a whole week, and then ask her what on earth she has done
+with her money!"
+
+"Kane, I wish you would go over my accounts," she said one evening, in
+desperation. "Just suggest where you would cut down!"
+
+Mr. Salisbury ran his eye carelessly over the pages of the little
+ledger.
+
+"Roast beef, two-forty?" he presently read aloud, questioningly.
+
+"Twenty-two cents a pound," his wife answered simply. But the man's
+slight frown deepened.
+
+"Too much--too much!" he said, shaking his head.
+
+Mrs. Salisbury let him read on a moment, turn a page or two. Then she
+said, in a dead calm:
+
+"Do you think my roasts are too big, Kane?"
+
+"Too big? On the contrary," her husband answered briskly, "I like a big
+roast. Sometimes ours are skimpy-looking before they're even cut!"
+
+"Well!" Mrs. Salisbury said triumphantly.
+
+Her smile apprised her husband that he was trapped, and he put down the
+account book in natural irritation.
+
+"Well, my dear, it's your problem!" he said unsympathetically,
+returning to his newspaper. "I run my business, I expect you to run
+yours! If we can't live on our income, we'll have to move to a cheaper
+house, that's all, or take Stanford out of school and put him to work.
+Dickens says somewhere--and he never said a truer thing!" pursued the
+man of the house comfortably, "that, if you spend a sixpence less than
+your income every week, you are rich. If you spend a sixpence more, you
+never may expect to be anything but poor!"
+
+Mrs. Salisbury did not answer. She took up her embroidery, whose bright
+colors blurred and swam together through the tears that came to her
+eyes.
+
+"Never expect to feel anything but poor!" she echoed sadly to herself.
+"I am sure I never do! Things just seem to run away with me; I can't
+seem to get hold of them. I don't see where it's going to end!"
+
+"Mother," said Alexandra, coming in from the kitchen, "Marthe says that
+all that delicious chicken soup is spoiled. The idiot, she says that
+you left it in the pantry to cool, and she forgot to put it on the ice!
+Now, what shall we do, just skip soup, or get some beef extract and
+season it up?"
+
+"Skip soup," said Mr. Salisbury cheerfully.
+
+"We can't very well, dear," said his wife patiently, "because the
+dinner is just soup and a fish salad, and one needs the hot start in a
+perfectly cold supper. No. I'll go out."
+
+"Can't you just tell me what to do?" asked Alexandra impatiently.
+
+But her mother had gone. The girl sat on the arm of the deserted chair,
+swinging an idle foot.
+
+"I wish I could cook!" she fretted.
+
+"Can't you, Sandy?" her father asked.
+
+"Oh, some things! Rabbits and fudge and walnut wafers! But I mean that
+I wish I understood sauces and vegetables and seasoning, and getting
+things cooked all at the same moment! I don't mean that I'd like to do
+it, but I would like to know how. Now, Mother'll scare up some
+perfectly delicious soup for dinner, cream of something or other, and I
+could do it perfectly well, if only I knew how!"
+
+"Suppose I paid you a regular salary, Sandy--" her father was
+beginning, with the untiring hopefulness of the American father. But
+the girl interrupted vivaciously:
+
+"Dad, darling, that isn't practical! I'd love it for about two days.
+Then we'd settle right down to washing dishes, and setting tables, and
+dusting and sweeping, and wiping up floors--horrors, horrors, horrors!"
+
+She left her perch to take in turn an arm of her father's chair.
+
+"Well, what's the solution, pussy?" asked Kane Salisbury, keenly
+appreciative of the nearness of her youth and beauty.
+
+"It isn't that," said Sandy decidedly. "Of course," she pursued, "the
+Gregorys get along without a maid, and use a fireless cooker, and drink
+cereal coffee, but admit, darling, that you'd rather have me useless
+and frivolous as I am!--than Gertrude or Florence or Winifred Gregory!
+Why, when Floss was married, Dad, Gertrude played the piano, for music,
+and for refreshments they had raspberry ice-cream and chocolate layer
+cake!"
+
+"Well, I like chocolate layer cake," observed her father mildly. "I
+thought that was a very pretty wedding; the sisters in their light
+dresses--"
+
+"Dimity dresses at a wedding!" Alexandra reproached him, round-eyed.
+"And they are so boisterously proud of the fact that they live on their
+father's salary," she went on, arranging her own father's hair
+fastidiously; "it's positively offensive the way they bounce up to
+change plates and tell you how to make the neck of mutton appetizing,
+or the heart of a cow, or whatever it is! And their father pushes the
+chairs back, Dad, and helps roll up the napkins--I'd die if you ever
+tried it!"
+
+"But they all work, too, don't they?"
+
+"Work? Of course they work! And every cent of it goes into the bank.
+Winnie and Florence are buying gas shares, and Gertrude means to have a
+year's study in Europe, if you please!"
+
+"That doesn't sound very terrible," said Kane Salisbury, smiling. But
+some related thought darkened his eyes a moment later. "You wouldn't
+have much gas stock if I was taken, Pussy," said he.
+
+"No, darling, and let that be a lesson to you not to die!" his daughter
+said blithely. "But I could work, Dad," she added more seriously, "if
+Mother didn't mind so awfully. Not in the kitchen, but somewhere. I'd
+love to work in a settlement house."
+
+"Now, there you modern girls are," her father said. "Can't bear to
+clear away the dinner plates in your own houses, yet you'll cheerfully
+suggest going to live in the filthiest parts of the city, working, as
+no servant is ever expected to work, for people you don't know!"
+
+"I know it's absurd," Sandy agreed, smiling. Her answer was ready
+somewhere in her mind, but she could not quite find it. "But, you see,
+that's a new problem," she presently offered, "that's ours to-day, just
+as managing your house was Mother's when she married you. Circumstances
+have changed. I couldn't ever take up the kitchen question just as it
+presents itself to Mother. I--people my age don't believe in a servant
+class. They just believe in a division of labor, all dignified. If some
+girl I knew, Grace or Betty, say, came into our kitchen--and that
+reminds me!" she broke off suddenly.
+
+"Of what?"
+
+"Why, of something Owen--Owen Sargent was saying a few days ago. His
+mother's quite daffy about establishing social centers and clubs for
+servant girls, you know, and she's gotten into this new thing, a sort
+of college for servants. Now I'll ask Owen about it. I'll do that
+to-morrow. That's just what I'll do!"
+
+"Tell me about it," her father said. But Alexandra shook her head.
+
+"I don't honestly know anything about it, Dad. But Owen had a lot of
+papers and a sort of prospectus. His mother was wishing that she could
+try one of the graduates, but she keeps six or seven house servants,
+and it wouldn't be practicable. But I'll see. I never thought of us!
+And I'll bring Owen home to dinner to-morrow. Is that all right,
+Mother?" she asked, as her mother came back into the room.
+
+"Owen? Certainly, dear; we're always glad to see him," Mrs. Salisbury
+said, a shade too casually, in a tone well calculated neither to alarm
+nor encourage, balanced to keep events uninterruptedly in their natural
+course. But Alexandra was too deep in thought to notice a tone.
+
+"You'll see--this is something entirely new, and just what we need!"
+she said gaily.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The constant visits of Owen Sargent, had he been but a few years older,
+and had Sandy been a few years older, would have filled Mrs.
+Salisbury's heart with a wild maternal hope. As it was, with Sandy
+barely nineteen, and Owen not quite twenty-two, she felt more
+tantalizing discomfort in their friendship than satisfaction. Owen was
+a dear boy, queer, of course, but fine in every way, and Sandy was
+quite the prettiest girl in River Falls; but it was far too soon to
+begin to hope that they would do the entirely suitable and acceptable
+thing of falling in love with each other. "That would be quite too
+perfect!" thought Mrs. Salisbury, watching them together.
+
+No; Owen was too rich to be overlooked by all sorts of other girls,
+scrupulous and unscrupulous. Every time he went with his mother for a
+week to Atlantic City or New York, Mrs. Salisbury writhed in
+apprehension of the thousand lures that must be spread on all sides
+about his lumbering feet. He was just the sweet, big, simple sort to be
+trapped by some little empty-headed girl, some little marplot clever
+enough to pretend an interest in the prison problem, or the free-milk
+problem, or some other industrial problem in which Owen had seen fit to
+interest himself. And her lovely, dignified Sandy, reflected the
+mother, a match for him in every way, beautiful, good, clever, just the
+woman to win him, by her own charm and the charms of children and home,
+away from the somewhat unnatural interests with which he had surrounded
+himself, must sit silent and watch him throw himself away.
+
+Sandy, of course, had never had any idea of Owen in this light, of that
+her mother was quite sure. Sandy treated him as she did her own
+brothers, frankly, despotically, delightfully. And perhaps it was
+wiser, after all, not to give the child a hint, for it was evident that
+the shy, gentle Owen was absolutely at home and happy in the Salisbury
+home; nothing would be gained by making Sandy feel self-conscious and
+responsible now.
+
+Mrs. Salisbury really did not like Owen Sargent very well, although his
+money made her honestly think she did. He had a wide, pleasant, but
+homely face, and an aureole of upstanding yellow hair, and a manner as
+unaffected as might have been expected from the child of his plain old
+genial father, and his mother, the daughter of a tanner. He lived
+alone, with his widowed mother, in a pleasant, old-fashioned house, set
+in park-like grounds that were the pride of River Falls. His mother
+often asked waitresses' unions and fresh-air homes to make use of these
+grounds for picnics, but Mrs. Salisbury knew that the house belonged to
+Owen, and she liked to dream of a day when Sandy's babies should tumble
+on those smooth lawns, and Sandy, erect and beautifully furred, should
+bring her own smart little motor car through that tall iron gateway.
+
+These dreams made her almost effusive in her manner to Owen, and Owen,
+who was no fool, understood perfectly what she was thinking of him; he
+understood his own energetic, busy mother; and he understood Sandy's
+mother, too. He knew that his money made him well worth any mother's
+attention.
+
+But, like her mother, he believed Sandy too young to have taken any
+cognizance of it. He thought the girl liked him as she liked anyone
+else, for his own value, and he sometimes dreamed shyly of her pleasure
+in suddenly realizing that Mrs. Owen Sargent would be a rich woman, the
+mistress of a lovely home, the owner of beautiful jewels.
+
+Both, however, were mistaken in Sandy. Her blue, blue eyes, so oddly
+effective under the silky fall of her straight, mouse-colored hair,
+were very keen. She knew exactly why her mother suggested that Owen
+should bring her here or there in the car, "Daddy and the boys and I
+will go in our old trap, just behind you!" She knew that Owen thought
+that her quick hand over his, in a game of hearts, the thoughtful stare
+of her demure eyes, across the dinner table, the help she accepted so
+casually, climbing into his big car--were all evidences that she was as
+unconscious of his presence as Stan was. But in reality the future for
+herself of which Sandy confidently dreamed was one in which, in all
+innocent complacency, she took her place beside Owen as his wife.
+Clumsy, wild-haired, bashful he might be at twenty-two, but the
+farsighted Sandy saw him ten years, twenty years later, well groomed,
+assured of manner, devotedly happy in his home life. She considered him
+entirely unable to take care of himself, he needed a good wife. And a
+good, true, devoted wife Sandy knew she would be, fulfilling to her
+utmost power all his lonely, little-boy dreams of birthday parties and
+Christmas revels.
+
+To do her justice, she really and deeply cared for him. Not with
+passion, for of that as yet she knew nothing, but with a real and
+absorbing affection. Sandy read "Love in a Valley" and the "Sonnets
+from the Portuguese" in these days, and thought of Owen. Now and then
+her well-disciplined little heart surprised her by an unexpected
+flutter in his direction.
+
+She duly brought him home with her to dinner on the evening after her
+little talk with her parents. Owen was usually to be found browsing
+about the region where Sandy played marches twice a week for sewing
+classes in a neighborhood house. They often met, and Sandy sometimes
+went to have tea with his mother, and sometimes, as to-day, brought him
+home with her.
+
+Owen had with him the letters, pamphlets and booklet issued by the
+American School of Domestic Science, and after dinner, while the
+Salisbury boys wrestled with their lessons, the three others and Owen
+gathered about the drawing-room table, in the late daylight, and
+thoroughly investigated the new institution and its claims. Sandy
+wedged her slender little person in between the two men. Mrs. Salisbury
+sat near by, reading what was handed to her. The older woman's attitude
+was one of dispassionate unbelief; she smiled a benign indulgence upon
+these newfangled ideas. But in her heart she felt the stirring of
+feminine uneasiness and resentment. It was HER sacred region, after
+all, into which these young people were probing so light-heartedly.
+These were her secrets that they were exploiting; her methods were to
+be disparaged, tossed aside.
+
+The booklet, with its imposing A.S.D.S. set out fair and plain upon a
+brown cover, was exhaustive. Its frontispiece was a portrait of one
+Eliza Slocumb Holley, founder of the school, and on its back cover it
+bore the vignetted photograph of a very pretty graduate, in apron and
+cap, with her broom and feather duster. In between these two pictures
+were pages and pages of information, dozens of pictures. There were
+delightful long perspectives of model kitchens, of vegetable gardens,
+orchards, and dairies. There were pictures of girls making jam, and
+sterilizing bottles, and arranging trays for the sick. There were girls
+amusing children and making beds. There were glimpses of the model
+flats, built into the college buildings, with gas stoves and
+dumb-waiters. And there were the usual pictures of libraries, and
+playgrounds, and tennis courts.
+
+"Such nice-looking girls!" said Sandy.
+
+"Oh, Mother says that they are splendid girls," Owen said, bashfully
+eager, "just the kind that go in for trained nursing, you know, or
+stenography, or bookkeeping."
+
+"They must be a solid comfort, those girls," said Mrs. Salisbury,
+leaning over to read certain pages with the others. "'First year,'" she
+read aloud. "'Care of kitchen, pantry, and
+utensils--fire-making--disposal of refuse--table-setting--service--care
+of furniture--cooking with gas--patent
+sweepers--sweeping--dusting--care of
+silver--bread--vegetables--puddings--'"
+
+"Help!" said Sandy. "It sounds like the essence of a thousand Mondays!
+No one could possibly learn all that in one year."
+
+"It's a long term, eleven months," her father said, deeply interested.
+"That's not all of the first year, either. But it's all practical
+enough."
+
+"What do they do the last year, Mother?"
+
+Mrs. Salisbury adjusted her glasses.
+
+"'Third year,'" she read obligingly. "'All soups, sauces, salads, ices
+and meats. Infant and invalid diet. Formal dinners, arranged by season.
+Budgets. Arrangement of work for one maid. Arrangement of work for two
+maids. Menus, with reference to expense, with reference to nourishment,
+with reference to attractiveness. Chart of suitable meals for children,
+from two years up. Table manners for children. Classic stories for
+children at bedtime. Flowers, their significance upon the table.
+Picnics--'"
+
+"But, no; there's something beyond that," Owen said. Mrs. Salisbury
+turned a page.
+
+"'Fourth Year. Post-graduate, not obligatory,'" she read. "'Unusual
+German, Italian, Russian and Spanish dishes. Translation of menus.
+Management of laundries, hotels and institutions. Work of a chef. Work
+of subordinate cooks. Ordinary poisons. Common dangers of canning.
+Canning for the market. Professional candy-making--'"
+
+"Can you beat it!" said Owen.
+
+"It's extraordinary!" Mrs. Salisbury conceded. Her husband asked the
+all-important question:
+
+"What do you have to pay for one of these paragons?"
+
+"It's all here," Mrs. Salisbury said. But she was distracted in her
+search of a scale of prices by the headlines of the various pages.
+"'Rules Governing Employers,'" she read, with amusement. "Isn't this
+too absurd? 'Employers of graduates of the A.S.D.S. will kindly respect
+the conditions upon which, and only upon which, contracts are based.'"
+She glanced down the long list of items. "'A comfortably furnished
+room,'" she read at random, "'weekly half holiday-access to nearest
+public library or family library--opportunity for hot bath at least
+twice weekly--two hours if possible for church attendance on
+Sunday--annual two weeks' holiday, or two holidays of one week
+each--full payment of salary in advance, on the first day of every
+month'--what a preposterous idea!" Mrs. Salisbury broke off to say.
+"How is one to know that she wouldn't skip off on the second?"
+
+"In that case the school supplies you with another maid for the
+unfinished term," explained Sandy, from the booklet.
+
+"Well--" the lady was still a little unsatisfied. "As if they didn't
+have privileges enough now!" she said. "It's the same old story: we are
+supposed to be pleasing them, not they us!"
+
+"'In a family where no other maid is kept,'" read Alexandra, "'a
+graduate will take entire charge of kitchen and dining room, go to
+market if required, do ordinary family washing and ironing, will clean
+bathroom daily, and will clean and sweep every other room in the house,
+and the halls, once thoroughly every week. She will be on hand to
+answer the door only one afternoon every week, besides Sunday--'"
+
+"What!" ejaculated Mrs. Salisbury.
+
+"I should like to know who does it on other days!" Alexandra added
+amazedly.
+
+"Don't you think that's ridiculous, Kane?" his wife asked eagerly.
+
+"We-el," the man of the house said temperately, "I don't know that I
+do. You see, otherwise the girl has a string tied on her all the time.
+People in our position, after all, needn't assume that we're too good
+to open our own door--"
+
+"That's exactly it, sir," Owen agreed eagerly; "Mother says that that's
+one of the things that have upset the whole system for so long! Just
+the convention that a lady can't open her own door--"
+
+"But we haven't found the scale of wages yet--" Mrs. Salisbury
+interrupted sweetly but firmly. Alexandra, however, resumed the recital
+of the duties of one maid.
+
+"'She will not be expected to assume the care of young children,'" she
+read, "nor to sleep in the room with them. She will not be expected to
+act as chaperone or escort at night. She--'"
+
+"It DOESN'T say that, Sandy!"
+
+"Oh, yes, it does! And, listen! 'NOTE. Employers are respectfully
+requested to maintain as formal an attitude as possible toward the
+maid. Any intimacy, or exchange of confidences, is especially to be
+avoided'"--Alexandra broke off to laugh, and her mother laughed with
+her, but indignantly.
+
+"Insulting!" she said lightly. "Does anyone suppose for an instant that
+this is a serious experiment?"
+
+"Come, that doesn't sound very ridiculous to me," her husband said.
+"Plenty of women do become confidential with their maids, don't they?"
+
+"Dear me, how much you do know about women!" Alexandra said, kissing
+the top of her father's head. "Aren't you the bad old man!"
+
+"No; but one might hope that an institution of this kind would put the
+American servant in her place," Mrs. Salisbury said seriously, "instead
+of flattering her and spoiling her beyond all reason. I take my maid's
+receipt for salary in advance; I show her the bathroom and the
+library--that's the idea, is it? Why, she might be a boarder! Next,
+they'll be asking for a place at the table and an hour's practice on
+the piano."
+
+"Well, the original American servant, the 'neighbor's girl,' who came
+in to help during the haying season, and to put up the preserves,
+probably did have a place at the table," Mr. Salisbury submitted mildly.
+
+"Mother thinks that America never will have a real servant class," Owen
+added uncertainly; "that is, until domestic service is elevated to
+the--the dignity of office work, don't you know? Until it attracts the
+nicer class of women, don't you know? Mother says that many a good
+man's fear of old age would be lightened, don't you know?--if he felt
+that, in case he lost his job, or died, his daughters could go into
+good homes, and grow up under the eye of good women, don't you know?"
+
+"Very nice, Owen, but not very practical!" Mrs. Salisbury said, with
+her indulgent, motherly smile. "Oh, dear me, for the good old days of
+black servants, and plenty of them!" she sighed. For though Mrs.
+Salisbury had been born some years after the days of plenty known to
+her mother on her grandfather's plantation, before the war, she was
+accustomed to detailed recitals of its grandeurs.
+
+"Here we are!" said Alexandra, finding a particular page that was
+boldly headed "Terms."
+
+"'For a cook and general worker, no other help,'" she read, "'thirty
+dollars per month--'"
+
+"Not so dreadful," her father said, pleasantly surprised.
+
+"But, listen, Dad! Thirty dollars for a family of two, and an
+additional two dollars and a half monthly for each other member of the
+family. That would make ours thirty-seven dollars and a half, wouldn't
+it?" she computed swiftly.
+
+"Awful! Impossible!" Mrs. Salisbury said instantly, almost in relief.
+The discussion made her vaguely uneasy. What did these casual amateurs
+know about the domestic problem, anyway? Kane, who was always anxious
+to avoid details; Sandy, all youthful enthusiasm and ignorance, and
+Owen Sargent, quoting his insufferable mother? For some moments she had
+been fighting an impulse to soothe them all with generalities. "Never
+mind; it's always been a problem, and it always will be! These new
+schemes are all very well, but don't trouble your dear heads about it
+any longer!"
+
+Now she sank back, satisfied. The whole thing was but a mad, Utopian
+dream. Thirty-seven dollars indeed! "Why, one could get two good
+servants for that!" thought Mrs. Salisbury, with the same sublime faith
+with which she had told her husband, in poorer days, years ago, that,
+if they could but afford her, she knew they could get a "fine girl" for
+three dollars a week. The fact that the "fine girl" did not apparently
+exist did not at all shake Mrs. Salisbury's confidence that she could
+get two "good girls." Her hope in the untried solution rose with every
+failure.
+
+"Thirty-seven is steep," said Kane Salisbury slowly. "However! What do
+we pay now, Mother?"
+
+"Five a week," said that lady inflexibly.
+
+"But we paid Germaine more," said Alexandra eagerly. "And didn't you
+pay Lizzie six and a half?"
+
+"The last two months I did, yes," her mother agreed unwillingly. "But
+that comes only to twenty-six or seven," she added.
+
+"But, look here," said Owen, reading. "Here it says: 'NOTE. Where a
+graduate is required to manage on a budget, it is computed that she
+saves the average family from two to seven dollars weekly on food and
+fuel bills.'"
+
+"Now that begins to sound like horse sense," Mr. Salisbury began. But
+the mistress of the house merely smiled, and shook a dubious head, and
+the younger members of the family here created a diversion by reminding
+their sister's guest, with animation, that he had half-asked them to go
+out for a short ride in his car. Alexandra accordingly ran for a veil,
+and the young quartette departed with much noise, Owen stuffing his
+pamphlets and booklet into his pocket before he went.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Salisbury settled down contentedly to double Canfield, the
+woman crushing out the last flicker of the late topic with a placid
+shake of the head, when the man asked her for her honest opinion of the
+American School of Domestic Science. "I don't truly think it's at all
+practical, dear," said Mrs. Salisbury regretfully. "But we might watch
+it for a year or two and go into the question again some time, if you
+like. Especially if some one else has tried one of these maids, and we
+have had a chance to see how it goes!"
+
+The very next morning Mrs. Salisbury awakened with a dull headache. Hot
+sunlight was streaming into the bedroom, an odor of coffee, drifting
+upstairs, made her feel suddenly sick. Her first thought was that she
+COULD not have Sandy's two friends to luncheon, and she COULD not keep
+a shopping and tea engagement with a friend of her own! She might creep
+through the day somehow, but no more.
+
+She dressed slowly, fighting dizziness, and went slowly downstairs,
+sighing at the sight of disordered music and dust in the dining-room,
+the sticky chafing-dish and piled plates in the pantry. In the kitchen
+was a litter of milk bottles, saucepans, bread and crumbs and bread
+knife encroaching upon a basket of spilled berries, egg shells and
+melting bacon. The blue sides of the coffee-pot were stained where the
+liquid and grounds had bubbled over it. Marthe was making toast, the
+long fork jammed into a plate hole of the range. Mrs. Salisbury thought
+that she had never seen sunlight so mercilessly hot and bright before--
+
+"Rotten coffee!" said Mr. Salisbury cheerfully, when his wife took her
+place at the table.
+
+"And she NEVER uses the poacher!" Alexandra added reproachfully. "And
+she says that the cream is sour because the man leaves it at half-past
+four, right there in the sunniest corner of the porch--can't he have a
+box or something, Mother?"
+
+"Gosh, I wouldn't care what she did if she'd get a move on," said
+Stanford frankly. "She's probably asleep out there, with her head in
+the frying pan!"
+
+Mrs. Salisbury went into the kitchen again. She had to pause in the
+pantry because the bright squares of the linoleum, and the brassy
+faucets, and the glare of the geraniums outside the window seemed to
+rush together for a second.
+
+Marthe was on the porch, exchanging a few gay remarks with the garbage
+man before shutting the side door after him. The big stove was roaring
+hot, a thick odor of boiling clothes showed that Marthe was ready for
+her cousin Nancy, the laundress, who came once a week. A saucepan
+deeply gummed with cereal was soaking beside the hissing and smoking
+frying pan Mrs. Salisbury moved the frying pan, and the quick heat of
+the coal fire rushed up at her face--
+
+"Why," she whispered, opening anxious eyes after what seemed a long
+time, "who fainted?"
+
+A wheeling and rocking mass of light and shadow resolved itself into
+the dining-room walls, settled and was still. She felt the soft
+substance of a sofa pillow under her head, the hard lump that was her
+husband's arm supporting her shoulders.
+
+"That's it--now she's all right!" said Kane Salisbury, his kind,
+concerned face just above her own. Mrs. Salisbury shifted heavy,
+languid eyes, and found Sandy.
+
+"Darling, you fell!" the daughter whispered. White-lipped, pitiful,
+with tears still on her round cheeks, Sandy was fanning her mother with
+a folded newspaper.
+
+"Well, how silly of me!" Mrs. Salisbury said weakly. She sighed, tried
+too quickly to sit up, and fainted quietly away again.
+
+This time she opened her eyes in her own bed, and was made to drink
+something sharp and stinging, and directed not to talk. While her
+husband and daughter were hanging up things, and reducing the tumbled
+room to order, the doctor arrived.
+
+"Dr. Hollister, I call this an imposition!" protested the invalid
+smilingly. "I have been doing a little too much, that's all! But don't
+you dare say the word rest-cure to me again!"
+
+But Doctor Hollister did not smile; there was no smiling in the house
+that day.
+
+"Mother may have to go away," Alexandra told anxious friends, very
+sober, but composed. "Mother may have to take a rest-cure," she said a
+day or two later.
+
+"But you won't let them send me to a hospital again, Kane?" pleaded his
+wife one evening. "I almost die of lonesomeness, wondering what you and
+the children are doing! Couldn't I just lie here? Marthe and Sandy can
+manage somehow, and I promise you I truly won't worry, just lie here
+like a queen!"
+
+"Well, perhaps we'll give you a trial," smiled Kane Salisbury, very
+much enjoying an hour of quiet, at his wife's bedside. "But don't count
+on Marthe. She's going."
+
+"Marthe is?" Mrs. Salisbury only leaned a little more heavily on the
+strong arm that held her, and laughed comfortably. "I refuse to concern
+myself with such sordid matters," she said. "But why?"
+
+"Because I've got a new girl, hon."
+
+"You have!" She shifted about to stare at him, aroused by his tone.
+Light came. "You've not gotten one of those college cooks, have you,
+Kane?" she demanded. "Oh, Kane! Not at thirty-seven dollars a month!
+Oh, you have, you wicked, extravagant boy!"
+
+"Cheaper than a trained nurse, petty!"
+
+Mrs. Salisbury was still shaking a scandalized head, but he could see
+the pleasure and interest in her eyes. She sank back in her pillows,
+but kept her thin fingers gripped tightly over his.
+
+"How you do spoil me, Tip!" The name took him back across many years to
+the little eighteen-dollar cottage and the days before Sandy came. He
+looked at his wife's frail little figure, the ruffled frills that
+showed under her loose wrapper, at throat and elbows. There was
+something girlish still about her hanging dark braid, her big eyes half
+visible in the summer twilight.
+
+"Well, you may depend upon it, you're in for a good long course of
+spoiling now, Miss Sally!" said he.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Justine Harrison, graduate servant of the American School of Domestic
+Science, arrived the next day. If Mrs. Salisbury was half consciously
+cherishing an expectation of some one as crisp and cheerful as a
+trained nurse might have been, she was disappointed. Justine was simply
+a nice, honest-looking American country girl, in a cheap, neat, brown
+suit and a dreadful hat. She smiled appreciatively when Alexandra
+showed her her attractive little room, unlocked what Sandy saw to be a
+very orderly trunk, changed her hot suit at once for the gray gingham
+uniform, and went to Mrs. Salisbury's room with great composure, for
+instructions. In passing, Alexandra--feeling the situation to be a
+little odd, yet bravely, showed her the back stairway and the bathroom,
+and murmured something about books being in the little room off the
+drawing-room downstairs. Justine smiled brightly.
+
+"Oh, I brought several books with me," she said, "and I subscribe to
+two weekly magazines and one monthly. So usually I have enough to read."
+
+"How do you do? You look very cool and comfortable, Justine. Now,
+you'll have to find your own way about downstairs. You'll see the
+coffee next to the bread box, and the brooms are in the laundry closet.
+Just do the best you can. Mr. Salisbury likes dry toast in the
+morning--eggs in some way. We get eggs from the milkman; they seem
+fresher. But you have to tell him the day before. And I understood that
+you'll do most of the washing? Yes. My old Nancy was here day before
+yesterday, so there's not much this week." It was in some such
+disconnected strain as this that Mrs. Salisbury welcomed and initiated
+the new maid.
+
+Justine bowed reassuringly.
+
+"I'll find everything, Madam. And do you wish me to manage and to
+market for awhile until you are about again?"
+
+The invalid sent a pleading glance to Sandy.
+
+"Oh, I think my daughter will do that," she said.
+
+"Oh, now, why, Mother?" Sandy asked, in affectionate impatience. "I
+don't begin to know as much about it as Justine probably does. Why not
+let her?"
+
+"If Madam will simply tell me what sum she usually spends on the
+table," said Justine, "I will take the matter in hand."
+
+Mrs. Salisbury hesitated. This was the very stronghold of her
+authority. It seemed terrible to her, indelicate, to admit a stranger.
+
+"Well, it varies a little," she said restlessly. "I am not accustomed
+to spending a set sum." She addressed her daughter. "You see, I've been
+paying Nancy every week, dear," said she, "and the other laundry. And
+little things come up--"
+
+"What sum would be customary, in a family this size?" Alexandra asked
+briskly of the graduate servant.
+
+Justine was business-like.
+
+"Seven dollars for two persons is the smallest sum we are allowed to
+handle," she said promptly. "After that each additional person calls
+for three dollars weekly in our minimum scale. Four or five dollars a
+week per person, not including the maid, is the usual allowance."
+
+"Mercy! Would that be twenty dollars for table alone?" the mistress
+asked. "It is never that now, I think. Perhaps twice a week," she said,
+turning to Alexandra, "your father gives me five dollars at the
+breakfast table--"
+
+"But, Mother, you telephone and charge at the market, and Lewis & Sons,
+too, don't you?" Sandy asked.
+
+"Well, yes, that's true. Yes, I suppose it comes to fully twenty-five
+dollars a week, when you think of it. Yes, it probably comes to more.
+But it never seems so much, somehow. Well, suppose we say twenty-five--"
+
+"Twenty-five, I'll tell Dad." Alexandra confirmed it briskly.
+
+"I used to keep accounts, years ago," Mrs. Salisbury said plaintively.
+"Your father--" and again she turned to her daughter, as if to make
+this revelation of her private affairs less distressing by so excluding
+the stranger. "Your father has always been the most generous of men,"
+she said; "he always gives me more money if I need it, and I try to do
+the best I can." And a little annoyed, in her weakness and helplessness
+by this business talk, she lay back on her pillow, and closed her eyes.
+
+"Twenty-five a week, then!" Alexandra said, closing the talk by jumping
+up from a seat on her mother's bed, and kissing the invalid's eyes in
+parting. Justine, who had remained standing, followed her down to the
+kitchen, where, with cheering promptitude, the new maid fell upon
+preparations for dinner. Alexandra rather bashfully suggested what she
+had vaguely planned for dinner; Justine nodded intelligently at each
+item; presently Alexandra left her, busily making butter-balls, and
+went upstairs to report.
+
+"Nothing sensational about her," said Sandy to her mother, "but she
+takes hold! She's got some bleaching preparation of soda or something
+drying on the sink-board; she took the shelf out of the icebox the
+instant she opened it, and began to scour it while she talked. She's
+got a big blue apron on, and she's hung a nice clean white one on the
+pantry door."
+
+There was nothing sensational about the tray which Justine carried up
+to the sick room that evening--nothing sensational in the dinner which
+was served to the diminished family. But the Salisbury family began
+that night to speak of Justine as the "Treasure."
+
+"Everything hot and well seasoned and nicely served," said the man of
+the house in high satisfaction, "and the woman looks like a servant,
+and acts like one. Sandy says she's turning the kitchen upside down,
+but, I say, give her her head!"
+
+The Treasure, more by accident than design, was indeed given her head
+in the weeks that followed, for Mrs. Salisbury steadily declined into a
+real illness, and the worried family was only too glad to delegate all
+the domestic problems to Justine. The invalid's condition, from
+"nervous breakdown" became "nervous prostration," and August was made
+terrible for the loving little group that watched her by the cruel
+fight with typhoid fever into which Mrs. Salisbury's exhausted little
+body was drawn. Weak as she was physically, her spirit never failed
+her; she met the overwhelming charges bravely, rallied, sank, rallied
+again and lived. Alexandra grew thin, if prettier than ever, and Owen
+Sargent grew bold and big and protecting to meet her need. The boys
+were "angels," their sister said, helpful, awed and obedient, but the
+children's father began to stoop a little and to show gray in the thick
+black hair at his temples.
+
+Soberly, sympathetically, Justine steered her own craft through all the
+storm and confusion of the domestic crisis. Trays appeared and
+disappeared without apparent effort. Hot and delicious meals were ready
+at the appointed hours, whether the pulse upstairs went up or down.
+Tradespeople were paid; there was always ice; there was always hot
+water. The muffled telephone never went unanswered, the doctor never
+had to ring twice for admittance. If fruit was sent up to the invalid,
+it was icy cold; if soup was needed, it appeared, smoking hot, and
+guiltless of even one floating pinpoint of fat.
+
+Alexandra and the trained nurse always found the kitchen the same:
+orderly, aired, silent, with Justine, a picture of domestic efficiency,
+sitting by the open window, or on the shady side porch, shelling peas
+or peeling apples, or perhaps wiping immaculate glasses with an
+immaculate cloth at the sink. The ticking clock, the shining range, the
+sunlight lying in clean-cut oblongs upon the bright linoleum, Justine's
+smoothly braided hair and crisp percales, all helped to form a picture
+wonderfully restful and reassuring in troubled days.
+
+Alexandra, tired with a long vigil in the sick room, liked to slip down
+late at night, to find Justine putting the last touches to the day's
+good work. A clean checked towel would be laid over the rising, snowy
+mound of dough; the bubbling oatmeal was locked in the fireless cooker,
+doors were bolted, window shades drawn. There was an admirable
+precision about every move the girl made.
+
+The two young women liked to chat together, and sometimes, when some
+important message took her to Justine's door in the evening, Alexandra
+would linger, pleasantly affected by the trim little apartment, the
+roses in a glass vase, Justine's book lying open-faced on the bed, or
+her unfinished letter waiting on the table. For all exterior signs, at
+these times, she might have been a guest in the house.
+
+Promptly, on every Saturday evening, the Treasure presented her account
+book to Mr. Salisbury. There was always a small balance, sometimes five
+dollars, sometimes one, but Justine evidently had well digested
+Dickens' famous formula for peace of mind.
+
+"You're certainly a wonder, Justine!" said the man of the house more
+than once. "How do you manage it?"
+
+"Oh, I cut down in dozens of ways," the girl returned, with her grave
+smile. "You don't notice it, but I know. You have kidney stews, and
+onion soups, and cherry pies, instead of melons and steaks and
+ice-cream, that's all!"
+
+"And everyone just as well pleased," he said, in real admiration. "I
+congratulate you."
+
+"It's only what we are all taught at college," Justine assured him.
+"I'm just doing what they told me to! It's my business."
+
+"It's pretty big business, and it's been waiting a long while," said
+Kane Salisbury.
+
+When Mrs. Salisbury began to get well, she began to get very hungry.
+This was plain sailing for Justine, and she put her whole heart into
+the dainty trays that went upstairs three times a day. While she was
+enjoying them, Mrs. Salisbury liked to draw out her clever maid, and
+the older woman and the young one had many a pleasant talk together.
+Justine told her mistress that she had been country-born and bred, and
+had grown up with a country girl's longing for nice surroundings and
+education of the better sort.
+
+"My name is not Justine at all," she said smilingly, "nor Harrison,
+either, although I chose it because I have cousins of that name. We are
+all given names when we go to college and take them with us. Until the
+work is recognized, as it must be some day, as dignified and even
+artistic, we are advised to sink our own identities in this way."
+
+"You mean that Harrison isn't your name?" Mrs. Salisbury felt this to
+be really a little alarming, in some vague way.
+
+"Oh, no! And Justine was given me as a number might have been."
+
+"But what is your name?" The question fell from Mrs. Salisbury as
+naturally as an "Ouch!" would have fallen had somebody dropped a
+lighted match on her hand. "I had no idea of that!" she went on
+artlessly. "But I suppose you told Mr. Salisbury?"
+
+The luncheon was finished, and now Justine stood up, and picked up the
+tray.
+
+"No. That's the very point. We use our college names," she reiterated
+simply. "Will you let me bring you up a little more custard, Madam?"
+
+"No, thank you," Mrs. Salisbury said, after a second's pause. She
+looked a little thoughtful as Justine walked away. There is no real
+reason why one's maid should not wear an assumed name, of course.
+Still--
+
+"What a ridiculous thing that college must be!" said Mrs. Salisbury,
+turning comfortably in her pillows. "But she certainly is a splendid
+cook!"
+
+About this point, at least, there was no argument. Justine did not need
+cream or sherry, chopped nuts or mushroom sauces to make simple food
+delicious. She knew endless ways in which to serve food; potatoes
+became a nightly surprise, macaroni was never the same, rice had a
+dozen delightful roles. Because the family enjoyed her maple custard or
+almond cake, she did not, as is the habit with cooks, abandon every
+other flavoring for maple or almond. She was following a broader
+schedule than that supplied by the personal tastes of the Salisburys,
+and she went her way serenely.
+
+Not so much as a teaspoonful of cold spinach was wasted in these days.
+Justine's "left-over" dishes were quite as good as anything else she
+cooked; her artful combinations, her garnishes of pastry, her illusive
+seasoning, her enveloping and varied sauces disguised and transformed
+last night's dinner into a real feast to-night.
+
+The Treasure went to market only twice a week, on Saturdays and
+Tuesdays. She planned her meals long beforehand, with the aid of charts
+brought from college, and paid cash for everything she bought. She
+always carried a large market basket on her arm on these trips, and
+something in her trim, strong figure and clean gray gown, as she
+started off, appealed to a long-slumbering sense of house-holder's
+pride in Mr. Salisbury. It seemed good to him that a person who worked
+so hard for him and for his should be so bright and contented looking,
+should like her life so well.
+
+Late in September Mrs. Salisbury came downstairs again to a spotless
+drawing-room and a dining-room gay with flowers. Dinner was a little
+triumph, and after dinner she was escorted to a deep chair, and called
+upon to admire new papers and hangings, cleaned rugs and a newly
+polished floor.
+
+"You are wonderful, wonderful people, every one of you!" said the
+convalescent, smiling eyes roving about her. "Grass paper, Kane, and
+such a dear border!" she said. "And everything feeling so clean! And my
+darling girl writing letters and seeing people all these weeks! And my
+boys so good! And dear old Daddy carrying the real burden for
+everyone--what a dreadfully spoiled woman I am! And Justine--come here
+a minute, Justine--"
+
+The Treasure, who was clearing the dining-room table, came in, and
+smiled at the pretty group, mother and father, daughter and sons, all
+rejoicing in being well and together again.
+
+"I don't know how I am ever going to thank you, Justine," said Mrs.
+Salisbury, with a little emotion. She took the girl's hand in both her
+transparent white ones. "Do believe that I appreciate it," she said.
+"It has been a comfort to me, even when I was sickest, even when I
+apparently didn't know anything, to know that you were here, that
+everything was running smoothly and comfortably, thanks to you. We
+could not have managed without you!"
+
+Justine returned the finger pressure warmly, also a little stirred.
+
+"Why, it's been a real pleasure," she said a little huskily. She had to
+accept a little chorus of thanks from the other members of the family
+before, blushing very much and smiling, too, she went back to her work.
+
+"She really has managed everything," Kane Salisbury told his wife
+later. "She handles all the little monthly bills, telephone and gas and
+so on; seems to take it as a matter of course that she should."
+
+"And what shall I do now, Kane? Go on that way, for a while anyway?"
+asked his wife.
+
+"Oh, by all means, dear! You must take things easy for a while. By
+degrees you can take just as much or as little as you want, with the
+managing."
+
+"You dear old idiot," the lady said tenderly, "don't worry about that!
+It will all come about quite naturally and pleasantly."
+
+Indeed, it was still a relief to depend heavily upon Justine. Mrs.
+Salisbury was quite bewildered by the duties that rose up on every side
+of her; Sandy's frocks for the fall, the boys' school suits, calls that
+must be made, friends who must be entertained, and the opening
+festivities of several clubs to which she belonged.
+
+She found things running very smoothly downstairs, there seemed to be
+not even the tiniest flaw for a critical mistress to detect, and the
+children had added a bewildering number of new names to their lists of
+favorite dishes. Justine was asked over and over again for her Manila
+curry, her beef and kidney pie, her scones and German fruit tarts, and
+for a brown and crisp and savory dish in which the mistress of the
+house recognized, under the title of chou farci, an ordinary cabbage as
+a foundation.
+
+"Oh, let's not have just chickens or beef," Sandy would plead when a
+company dinner was under discussion. "Let's have one of Justine's fussy
+dishes. Leave it to Justine!"
+
+For the Treasure obviously enjoyed company dinner parties, and it was
+fascinating to Sandy to see how methodically, and with what delightful
+leisure, she prepared for them. Two or three days beforehand her
+cake-making, silver-polishing, sweeping and cleaning were well under
+way, and the day of the event itself was no busier than any other day.
+
+Yet it was on one of these occasions that Mrs. Salisbury first had what
+she felt was good reason to criticize Justine. During a brief absence
+from home of both boys, their mother planned a rather formal dinner.
+Four of her closest friends, two couples, were asked, and Owen Sargent
+was invited by Sandy to make the group an even eight. This was as many
+as the family table accommodated comfortably, and seemed quite an
+event. Ordinarily the mistress of the house would have been fussing for
+some days beforehand, in her anxiety to have everything go well, but
+now, with Justine's brain and Justine's hands in command of the kitchen
+end of affairs, she went to the other extreme, and did not give her own
+and Sandy's share of the preparations a thought until the actual day of
+the dinner.
+
+For, as was stipulated in her bond, except for a general cleaning once
+a week, the Treasure did no work downstairs outside of the dining-room
+and kitchen, and made no beds at any time. This meant that the daughter
+of the house must spend at least an hour every morning in bed-making,
+and perhaps another fifteen minutes in that mysteriously absorbing
+business known as "straightening" the living room. Usually Sandy was
+very faithful to these duties; more, she whisked through them
+cheerfully, in her enthusiastic eagerness that the new domestic
+experiment should prove a success.
+
+But for a morning or two before this particular dinner she had shirked
+her work. Perhaps the novelty of it was wearing off a little. There was
+a tennis tournament in progress at the Burning Woods Country Club, two
+miles away from River Falls, and Sandy, who was rather proud of her
+membership in this very smart organization, did not want to miss a
+moment of it. Breakfast was barely over before somebody's car was at
+the door to pick up Miss Salisbury, who departed in a whirl of laughter
+and a flutter of bright veils, to be gone, sometimes, for the entire
+day.
+
+She had gone in just this way on the morning of the dinner, and her
+mother, who had quite a full program of her own for the morning, had
+had breakfast in bed. Mrs. Salisbury came downstairs at about ten
+o'clock to find the dining-room airing after a sweeping; curtains
+pinned back, small articles covered with a dust cloth, chairs at all
+angles. She went on to the kitchen, where Justine was beating
+mayonnaise.
+
+"Don't forget chopped ice for the shaker, the last thing," Mrs.
+Salisbury said, adding, with a little self-conscious rush, "And, oh, by
+the way, Justine, I see that Miss Alexandra has gone off again, without
+touching the living room. Yesterday I straightened it a little bit, but
+I have two club meetings this morning, and I'm afraid I must fly.
+If--if she comes in for lunch, will you remind her of it?"
+
+"Will she be back for lunch? I thought she said she would not," Justine
+said, in honest surprise.
+
+"No; come to think of it, she won't," her mother admitted, a little
+flatly. "She put her room and her brothers' room in order," she added
+inconsequently.
+
+Justine did not answer, and Mrs. Salisbury went slowly out of the
+kitchen, annoyance rising in her heart. It was all very well for Sandy
+to help out about the house, but this inflexible idea of holding her to
+it was nonsense!
+
+Ruffled, she went up to her room. Justine had carried away the
+breakfast tray, but there were towels and bath slippers lying about, a
+litter of mail on the bed, and Mr. Salisbury's discarded linen strewn
+here and there. The dressers were in disorder, window curtains were
+pinned back for more air, and the coverings of the twin beds thrown
+back and trailing on the floor. Fifteen minutes' brisk work would have
+straightened the whole, but Mrs. Salisbury could not spare the time
+just then. The morning was running away with alarming speed; she must
+be dressed for a meeting at eleven o'clock, and, like most women of her
+age, she found dressing a slow and troublesome matter; she did not like
+to be hurried with her brushes and cold creams, her ruffles and veil.
+
+The thought of the unmade beds did not really trouble her when, trim
+and dainty, she went off in a friend's car to the club at eleven
+o'clock, but when she came back, nearly two hours later, it was
+distinctly an annoyance to find her bedroom still untouched. She was
+tired then, and wanted her lunch; but instead she replaced her street
+dress with a loose house gown, and went resolutely to work.
+
+Musing over her solitary luncheon, she found the whole thing a little
+absurd. There was still the drawing-room to be put in order, and no
+reason in the world why Justine should not do it. The girl was not
+overworked, and she was being paid thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents
+every month! Justine was big and strong, she could toss the little
+extra work off without any effort at all.
+
+She wondered why it is almost a physical impossibility for a nice woman
+to ask a maid the simplest thing in the world, if she is fairly certain
+that that maid will be ungracious about it.
+
+"Dear me!" thought Mrs. Salisbury, eating her chop and salad, her hot
+muffin and tart without much heart to appreciate these delicacies, "How
+much time I have spent in my life, going through imaginary
+conversations with maids! Why couldn't I just step to the pantry door
+and say, in a matter-of-fact tone, 'I'm afraid I must ask you to put
+the sitting-room in order, Justine. Miss Sandy has apparently forgotten
+all about it. I'll see that it doesn't occur again.' And I could
+add--now that I think of it--'I will pay you for your extra time, if
+you like, and if you will remind me at the end of the month.'"
+
+"Well, she may not like it, but she can't refuse," was her final
+summing up. She went out to the kitchen with a deceptive air of
+composure.
+
+Justine's occupation, when Mrs. Salisbury found her, strengthened the
+older woman's resolutions. The maid, in a silent and spotless kitchen,
+was writing a letter. Sheets of paper were strewn on the scoured white
+wood of the kitchen table; the writer, her chin cupped in her hand, was
+staring dreamily out of the kitchen window. She gave her mistress an
+absent smile, then laid down her pen and stood up.
+
+"I'm writing here," she explained, "so that I can catch the milkman for
+the cream."
+
+Mrs. Salisbury knew that it was useless to ask if everything was in
+readiness for the evening's event. From where she stood she could see
+piles of plates already neatly ranged in the warming oven, peeled
+potatoes were soaking in ice water in a yellow bowl, and the parsley
+that would garnish the big platter was ready, crisp and fresh in a
+glass of water.
+
+"Well, you look nice and peaceful," smiled the mistress. "I am just
+going to dress for a little tea, and I may have to look in at the
+opening of the Athenaeum Club," she went on, fussing with a frill at
+her wrist, "so I may be as late as five. But I'll bring some flowers
+when I come. Miss Alexandra will probably be at home by that time, but
+if she isn't--if she isn't, perhaps you would just go in and straighten
+the living room, Justine? I put things somewhat in order yesterday, and
+dusted a little, but, of course, things get scattered about, and it
+needs a little attention. She may of course be back in time to do it--"
+
+Her voice drifted away into casual silence. She looked at Justine
+expectantly, confidently. The maid flushed uncomfortably.
+
+"I'm sorry," she said frankly. "But that's against one of our rules,
+you know. I am not supposed to--"
+
+"Not ordinarily, I understand that," Mrs. Salisbury agreed quickly.
+"But in an emergency--"
+
+Again she hesitated. And Justine, with the maddening gentleness of the
+person prepared to carry a point at all costs, answered again:
+
+"It's the rule. I'm sorry; but I am not supposed to."
+
+"I should suppose that you were in my house to make yourself useful to
+me," Mrs. Salisbury said coldly. She used a tone of quiet dignity; but
+she knew that she had had the worst of the encounter. She was really a
+little dazed by the firmness of the rebuff.
+
+"They make a point of our keeping to the letter of the law," Justine
+explained.
+
+"Not knowing what my particular needs are, nor how I like my house to
+be run, is that it?" the other woman asked shrewdly.
+
+"Well--" Justine hung upon an embarrassed assent. "But perhaps they
+won't be so firm about it as soon as the school is really established,"
+she added eagerly.
+
+"No; I think they will not!" Mrs. Salisbury agreed with a short laugh,
+"inasmuch as they CANNOT, if they ever hope to get any foothold at all!"
+
+And she left the kitchen, feeling that in the last remark at least she
+had scored, yet very angry at Justine, who made this sort of warfare
+necessary.
+
+"If this sort of thing keeps up, I shall simply have to let her GO!"
+she said.
+
+But she was trembling, and she came to a full stop in the front hall.
+It was maddening; it was unbelievable; but that neglected half hour of
+work threatened to wreck her entire day. With every fiber of her being
+in revolt, she went into the sitting-room.
+
+This was Alexandra's responsibility, after all, she said to herself.
+And, after a moment's indecision, she decided to telephone her daughter
+at the Burning Woods Club.
+
+"Hello, Mother," said Alexandra, when a page had duly informed her that
+she was wanted at the telephone. Her voice sounded a little tired,
+faintly impatient. "What is it, Mother?"
+
+"Why, I ought to go to Mary Bell's tea, dearie, and I wanted just to
+look in at the Athenaeum--" Mrs. Salisbury began, a little
+inconsequently. "How soon do you expect to be home?" she broke off to
+ask.
+
+"I don't know," said Sandy lifelessly.
+
+"Are you coming back with Owen?"
+
+"No," Sandy said, in the same tone. "I'll come back with the Prichards,
+I guess, or with one of the girls. Owen and the Brice boy are taking
+Miss Satterlee for a little spin up around Feather Rock."
+
+"Miss WHO?" But Mrs. Salisbury knew very well who Miss Satterlee was. A
+pretty and pert and rowdyish little dancer, she had managed to
+captivate one or two of the prominent matrons of the club, and was much
+in evidence there, to the great discomfort of the more conservative
+Sandy and her intimates.
+
+Now Sandy's mother ended the conversation with a few very casual
+remarks, in not too sympathetic or indignant a vein. Then, with heart
+and mind in anything but a hospitable or joyous state, she set about
+the task of putting the sitting room in order. She abandoned once and
+for all any hope of getting to her club or her tea that afternoon, and
+was therefore possessed of three distinct causes of grievance.
+
+With her mother heart aching for the quiet misery betrayed by Sandy's
+voice, she could not blame the girl. Nor could she blame herself. So
+Justine got the full measure of her disapproval, and, while she worked,
+Mrs. Salisbury refreshed her soul with imaginary conversations in which
+she kindly but firmly informed Justine that her services were no longer
+needed--
+
+However, the dinner was perfect. Course smoothly followed course; there
+was no hesitating, no hitch; the service was swift, noiseless,
+unobtrusive. The head of the house was obviously delighted, and the
+guests enthusiastic.
+
+Best of all, Owen arrived early, irreproachably dressed, if a little
+uncomfortable in his evening clothes, and confided to Sandy that he had
+had a "rotten time" with Miss Satterlee.
+
+"But she's just the sort of little cat that catches a dear, great big
+idiot like Owen," said Sandy to her mother, when the older woman had
+come in to watch the younger slip into her gown for the evening's
+affair.
+
+"Look out, dear, or I will begin to suspect you of a tendresse in that
+direction!" the mother said archly.
+
+"For Owen?" Sandy raised surprised brows. "I'm mad about him, I'd marry
+him to-night!" she went on calmly.
+
+"If you really cared, dear, you couldn't use that tone," her mother
+said uncomfortably. "Love comes only once, REAL love, that is--"
+
+"Oh, Mother! There's no such thing as real love," Sandy said
+impatiently. "I know ten good, nice men I would marry, and I'll bet you
+did, too, years ago, only you weren't brought up to admit it! But I
+like Owen best, and it makes me sick to see a person like Rose
+Satterlee annexing him. She'll make him utterly wretched; she's that
+sort. Whereas I am really decent, don't you know; I'd be the sort of
+wife he'd go crazier and crazier about. He's one of those unfortunate
+men who really don't know what they want until they get something they
+don't want. They--"
+
+"Don't, dear. It distresses me to hear you talk this way," Mrs.
+Salisbury said, with dignity. "I don't know whether modern girls
+realize how dreadful they are," she went on, "but at least I needn't
+have my own daughter show such a lack of--of delicacy and of
+refinement." And in the dead silence that followed she cast about for
+some effective way of changing the subject, and finally decided to tell
+Sandy what she thought of Justine.
+
+But here, too, Sandy was unsympathetic. Scowling as she hooked the
+filmy pink and silver of her evening gown, Sandy took up Justine's
+defense.
+
+"All up to me, Mother, every bit of it! And, honestly now, you had no
+right to ask her to do--"
+
+"No right!" Exasperated beyond all words, Mrs. Salisbury picked up her
+fan, gathered her dragging skirts together, and made a dignified
+departure from the room. "No right!" she echoed, more in pity than
+anger. "Well, really, I wonder sometimes what we are coming to! No
+right to ask my servant, whom I pay thirty-seven and a half dollars a
+month, to stop writing letters long enough to clean my sitting room!
+Well, right or wrong, we'll see!"
+
+But the cryptic threat contained in the last words was never carried
+out. The dinner was perfect, and Owen was back in his old position as
+something between a brother and a lover, full of admiring great laughs
+for Sandy and boyish confidences. There was not a cloud on the evening
+for Mrs. Salisbury. And the question of Justine's conduct was laid on
+the shelf.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+After the dinner party domestic matters seemed to run even more
+smoothly than before, but there was a difference, far below the
+surface, in Mrs. Salisbury's attitude toward the new maid. The mistress
+found herself incessantly looking for flaws in Justine's perfectness;
+for things that Justine might easily have done, but would not do.
+
+In this Mrs. Salisbury was unconsciously aided and abetted by her
+sister, Mrs. Otis, a large, magnificent woman of forty-five, who had a
+masterful and assured manner, as became a very rich and influential
+widow. Mrs. Otis had domineered Mrs. Salisbury throughout their
+childhood; she had brought up a number of sons and daughters in a
+highly successful manner, and finally she kept a houseful of servants,
+whom she managed with a firm hand, and managed, it must be admitted,
+very well. She had seen the Treasure many times before, but it was
+while spending a day in November with her sister that she first
+expressed her disapproval of Justine.
+
+"You spoil her, Sarah," said Mrs. Otis. "She's a splendid cook, of
+course, and a nice-mannered girl. But you spoil her."
+
+"I? I have nothing to do with it," Mrs. Salisbury asserted promptly.
+"She does exactly what the college permits; no more and no less."
+
+"Nonsense!" Mrs. Otis said largely, genially. And she exchanged an
+amused look with Sandy.
+
+The three ladies were in the little library, after luncheon, enjoying a
+coal fire. The sisters, both with sewing, were in big armchairs. Sandy,
+idly turning the pages of a new magazine, sat at her mother's feet. The
+first heavy rain of the season battered at the windows.
+
+"Now, that darning, Sally," Mrs. Otis said, glancing at her sister's
+sewing. "Why don't you simply call the girl and ask her to do it?
+There's no earthly reason why she shouldn't be useful. She's got
+absolutely nothing to do. The girl would probably be happier with some
+work in her hands. Don't encourage her to think that she can whisk
+through her lunch dishes and then rush off somewhere. They have no
+conscience about it, my dear. You're the mistress, and you are supposed
+to arrange things exactly to suit yourself, no matter if nobody else
+has ever done things your way from the beginning of time!"
+
+"That's a lovely theory, Auntie," said Alexandra, "but this is an
+entirely different situation."
+
+For answer Mrs. Otis merely compressed her lips, and flung the pink
+yarn that she was knitting into a baby's sacque steadily over her
+flashing needles.
+
+"Where's Justine now?" she asked, after a moment.
+
+"In her room," Mrs. Salisbury answered.
+
+"No; she's gone for a walk, Mother," Sandy said. "She loves to walk in
+the rain, and she wanted to change her library book, and send a
+telegram or something--"
+
+"Just like a guest in the house!" Mrs. Otis observed, with fine scorn.
+"Surely she asked you if she might go, Sally?"
+
+"No. Her--her work is done. She--comes and goes that way."
+
+"Without saying a word? And who answers the door?" Mrs. Otis was
+unaffectedly astonished now.
+
+"She does if she's in the house, Mattie, just as she answers the
+telephone. But she's only actually on duty one afternoon a week."
+
+"You see, the theory is, Auntie," Sandy supplied, "that persons on our
+income--I won't say of our position, for Mother hates that--but on our
+income, aren't supposed to require formal door-answering very often."
+
+Mrs. Otis, her knitting suspended, moved her round eyes from mother to
+daughter and back again. She did not say a word, but words were not
+needed.
+
+"I know it seems outrageous, in some ways, Mattie," Mrs. Salisbury
+presently said, with a little nervous laugh. "But what is one to do?"
+
+"Do?" echoed her sister roundly. "DO? Well, I know I keep six house
+servants, and have always kept at least three, and I never heard the
+equal of THIS in all my days! Do?--I'd show you what I'd do fast
+enough! Do you suppose I'd pay a maid thirty-seven dollars a month to
+go tramping off to the library in the rain, and to tell me what my
+social status was? Why, Evelyn keeps two, and pays one eighteen and one
+fifteen, and do you suppose she'd allow either such liberties? Not at
+all. The downstairs girl wears a nice little cap and apron--'Madam,
+dinner is served,' she says--"
+
+"Yes, but Evelyn's had seven cooks since she was married," Sandy, who
+was not a great admirer of her young married cousin, put in here, "and
+Arthur said that she actually cried because she could not give a decent
+dinner!"
+
+"Evelyn's only a beginner, dear," said Evelyn's mother sharply, "but
+she has the right spirit. No nonsense, regular holidays, and hard work
+when they are working is the only way to impress maids. Mary
+Underwood," she went on, turning to her sister, "says that, when she
+and Fred are to be away for a meal, she deliberately lays out extra
+work for the maid; she says it keeps her from getting ideas. No,
+Sally," Mrs. Otis concluded, with the older-sister manner she had worn
+years ago, "no, dear; you are all wrong about this, and sooner or later
+this girl will simply walk over you, and you'll see it as I do.
+Changing her book at the library, indeed! How did she know that you
+mightn't want tea served this afternoon?"
+
+"She wouldn't serve it, if we did, Aunt Martha," Sandy said, dimpling.
+"She never serves tea! That's one of the regulations."
+
+"Well, we simply won't discuss it," Mrs. Otis said, firm lines forming
+themselves at the corners of her capable mouth. "If you like that sort
+of thing, you like it, that's all! I don't. We'll talk of something
+else."
+
+But she could not talk of anything else. Presently she burst out afresh.
+
+"Dear me, when I think of the way Ma used to manage 'em! No nonsense
+there; it was walk a chalk line in Ma's house! Your grandmother," she
+said to Alexandra, with stern relish, "had had a pack of slaves about
+her in HER young days. But, of course, Sally," she added charitably,
+"you've been ill, and things do have to run themselves when one's ill--"
+
+"You don't get the idea, Auntie," Sandy said blithely. "Mother pays for
+efficiency. Justine isn't a mere extra pair of hands; she's a trained
+professional worker. She's just like a stenographer, except that what
+she does is ten times harder to learn than stenography. We can no more
+ask her to get tea than Dad could ask his head bookkeeper to--well, to
+drop in here some Sunday and O.K. Mother's household accounts. It's an
+age of specialization, Aunt Martha."
+
+"It's an age of utter nonsense," Mrs. Otis said forcibly. "But if your
+mother and father like to waste their money that way--"
+
+"There isn't much waste of money to it," Mrs. Salisbury put in neatly,
+"for Justine manages on less than I ever did. I think there's been only
+one week this fall when she hasn't had a balance."
+
+"A balance of what?"
+
+"A surplus, I mean. A margin left from her allowance."
+
+The pink wool fell heavily into Mrs. Otis's broad lap. "She handles
+your money for you, does she, Sally?"
+
+"Why, yes. She seems eminently fitted for it. And she does it for a
+third less, Mattie, truly. She more than saves the difference in her
+wages."
+
+"You let her buy things and pay tradesmen, do you?"
+
+"Oh, Auntie, why not?" Alexandra asked, amused but impatient. "Why
+shouldn't Mother let her do that?"
+
+"Well, it's not my idea of good housekeeping, that's all," Mrs. Otis
+said staidly. "Managing is the most important part of housekeeping. In
+giving such a girl financial responsibilities, you not only let go of
+the control of your household, but you put temptation in her way. No;
+let the girl try making some beds, and serving tea, now and then; and
+do your own marketing and paying, Sally. It's the only way."
+
+"Justine tempted--why, she's not that sort of girl at all!" Alexandra
+laughed gaily.
+
+"Very well, my dear, perhaps she's not, and perhaps you young girls
+know everything that is to be known about life," her aunt answered
+witheringly. "But when grown business men were cheated as easily as
+those men in the First National were," she finished impressively,
+alluding to recent occurrences in River Falls, "it seems a little
+astonishing to find a girl your age so sure of her own judgment, that's
+all."
+
+Sandy's answer, if indirect, was effective.
+
+"How about some tea?" she asked. "Will you have some, either of you? It
+only takes me a minute to get it."
+
+"And I wish you could have seen Mattie's expression, Kane," Mrs.
+Salisbury said to her husband when telling him of the conversation that
+evening, "really, she glared! I suppose she really can't understand
+how, with an expensive servant in the house--" Mrs. Salisbury's voice
+dropped a little on a note of mild amusement. She sat idly at her
+dressing table, her hair loosened, her eyes thoughtful. When she spoke
+again, it was with a shade of resentment. "And, really, it is most
+inconvenient," she said. "I don't want to impose upon a girl; I never
+DID impose upon a girl; but I like to feel that I'm mistress in my own
+house. If the work is too hard one day, I will make it easier the next,
+and so on. But, as Mat says, it LOOKS so disobliging in a maid to have
+her race off; SHE doesn't care whether you get any tea or not; SHE'S
+enjoying herself! And after all one's kindness--And then another
+thing," she presently roused herself to add, "Mat thinks that it is
+very bad management on my part to let Justine handle money. She says--"
+
+"I devoutly wish that Mattie Otis would mind--" Mr. Salisbury did not
+finish his sentence. He wound his watch, laid it on his bureau, and
+went on, more mildly: "If you can do better than Justine, it may or may
+not be worth your while to take that out of her hands; but, if you
+can't, it seems to me sheer folly. My Lord, Sally--"
+
+"Yes, I know! I know," Mrs. Salisbury said hastily. "But, really,
+Kane," she went on slowly, the color coming into her face, "let us
+suppose that every family had a graduate cook, who marketed and
+managed. And let us suppose the children, like ours, out of the
+nursery. Then just what share of her own household responsibility IS a
+woman supposed to take?
+
+"You are eternally saying, not about me, but about other men's wives,
+that women to-day have too much leisure as it is. But, with a Justine,
+why, I could go off to clubs and card parties every day! I'd know that
+the house was clean, the meals as good and as nourishing as could be;
+I'd know that guests would be well cared for and that bills would be
+paid. Isn't a woman, the mistress of a house, supposed to do more than
+that? I don't want to be a mere figurehead."
+
+Frowning at her own reflection in the glass, deeply in earnest, she
+tried to puzzle it out.
+
+"In the old times, when women had big estates to look after," she
+presently pursued, "servants, horses, cows, vegetables and fruit
+gardens, soap-making and weaving and chickens and babies, they had real
+responsibilities, they had real interests. Housekeeping to-day isn't
+interesting. It's confining, and it's monotonous. But take it away, and
+what is a woman going to do?"
+
+"That," her husband answered seriously, "is the real problem of the
+day, I truly believe. That is what you women have to discover.
+Delegating your housekeeping, how are you going to use your energies,
+and find the work you want to do in the world? How are you going to
+manage the questions of being obliged to work at home, and to suit your
+hours to yourself, and to really express yourselves, and at the same
+time get done some of the work of the world that is waiting for women
+to do."
+
+His wife continued to eye him expectantly.
+
+"Well, how?" said she.
+
+"I don't know. I'm asking you!" he answered pointedly. Mrs. Salisbury
+sighed.
+
+"Dear me, I do get so tired of this talk of efficiency, and women's
+work in the world!" she said. "I wish one might feel it was enough to
+live along quietly, busy with dressmaking, or perhaps now and then
+making a fancy dessert for guests, giving little teas and card parties,
+and making calls. It--" a yearning admiration rang in her voice, "it
+seems such a dignified, pleasant ideal to live up to!" she said.
+
+"Well, it looks as if we had seen the last of that particular type of
+woman," her husband said cheerfully. "Or at least it looks as if that
+woman would find her own level, deliberately separate herself from her
+more ambitious sisters, who want to develop higher arts than that of
+mere housekeeping."
+
+"And how do YOU happen to know so much about it, Kane?"
+
+"I? Oh, it's in the air, I guess," the man admitted. "The whole idea is
+changing. A man used to be ashamed of the idea of his wife working. Now
+men tell you with pride that their wives paint or write or bind
+books--Bates' wife makes loads of money designing toys, and Mrs.
+Brewster is consulting physician on a hospital staff. Mary
+Shotwell--she was a trained nurse--what was it she did?"
+
+"She gave a series of talks on hygiene for rich people's children," his
+wife supplied. "And of course Florence Yeats makes candy, and the
+Gerrish girls have opened a tea room in the old garage. But it seems
+funny, just the same! It seems funny to me that so many women find it
+worth while to hire servants, so that they can rush off to make the
+money to pay the servants! It would seem so much more normal to stay at
+home and do the housework themselves, and it would LOOK better."
+
+"Well, certain women always will, I suppose. And others will find their
+outlets in other ways, and begin to look about for Justines, who will
+lift the household load. I believe we'll see the time, Sally," said
+Kane Salisbury thoughtfully, "when a young couple, launching into
+matrimony, will discuss expenses with a mutual interest; you pay this
+and I'll pay that, as it were. A trained woman will step into their
+kitchen, and Madame will walk off to business with her husband, as a
+matter of course."
+
+"Heaven forbid!" Mrs. Salisbury said piously. "If there is anything
+romantic or tender or beautiful about married life under those
+circumstances, I fail to see it, that's all!"
+
+It happened, a week or two later, on a sharp, sunshiny morning in early
+winter, that Mrs. Salisbury and Alexandra found themselves sauntering
+through the nicest shopping district of River Falls. There were various
+small things to be bought for the wardrobes of mother and daughter,
+prizes for a card party, birthday presents for one of the boys, and a
+number of other little things.
+
+They happened to pass the windows of Lewis & Sons' big grocery, one of
+the finest shops in town, on their way from one store to another, and,
+attracted by a window full of English preserves, Mrs. Salisbury decided
+to go in and leave an order.
+
+"I hope that you are going to bring your account back to us, Mrs.
+Salisbury," said the alert salesman who waited upon them. "We are
+always sorry to let an old customer go."
+
+"But I have an account here," said Mrs. Salisbury, startled.
+
+The salesman, smiling, shook his head, and one of the members of the
+firm, coming up, confirmed the denial.
+
+"We were very sorry to take your name off our books, Mrs. Salisbury,"
+said he, with pleasant dignity; "I can remember your coming into the
+old store on River Street when this young lady here was only a small
+girl."
+
+His hand indicated a spot about three feet from the floor, as the
+height of the child Alexandra, and the grown Alexandra dimpled an
+appreciation of his memory.
+
+"But I don't understand," Mrs. Salisbury said, wrinkling her forehead;
+"I had no idea that the account was closed, Mr. Lewis. How long ago was
+this?"
+
+"It was while you were ill," said Mr. Lewis soothingly. "You might look
+up the exact date, Mr. Laird."
+
+"But why?" Mrs. Salisbury asked, prettily puzzled.
+
+"That I don't know," answered Mr. Lewis. "And at the time, of course,
+we did not press it. There was no complaint, of that I'm very sure."
+
+"But I don't understand," Mrs. Salisbury persisted. "I don't see who
+could have done it except Mr. Salisbury, and, if he had had any reason,
+he would have told me of it. However," she rose to go, "if you'll send
+the jams, and the curry, and the chocolate, Mr. Laird, I'll look into
+the matter at once."
+
+"And you're quite yourself again?" Mr. Lewis asked solicitously,
+accompanying them to the door. "That's the main thing, isn't it?
+There's been so much sickness everywhere lately. And your young lady
+looks as if she didn't know the meaning of the word. Wonderful morning,
+isn't it? Good morning, Mrs. Salisbury!"
+
+"Good morning!" Mrs. Salisbury responded graciously. But, as soon as
+she and Alexandra were out of hearing, her face darkened. "That makes
+me WILD!" said she.
+
+"What does, darling?"
+
+"That! Justine having the audacity to change my trade!"
+
+"But why should she want to, Mother?"
+
+"I really don't know. Given it to friends of hers perhaps."
+
+"Oh, Mother, she wouldn't!"
+
+"Well, we'll see." Mrs. Salisbury dropped the subject, and brought her
+mind back with a visible effort to the morning's work.
+
+Immediately after lunch she interrogated Justine. The girl was drying
+glasses, each one emerging like a bubble of hot and shining crystal
+from her checked glass towel.
+
+"Justine," began the mistress, "have we been getting our groceries from
+Lewis & Sons lately?"
+
+Justine placidly referred to an account book which she took from a
+drawer under the pantry shelves.
+
+"Our last order was August eleventh," she announced.
+
+Something in her unembarrassed serenity annoyed Mrs. Salisbury.
+
+"May I ask why?" she suggested sharply.
+
+"Well, they are a long way from here," Justine said, after a second's
+thought, "and they are very expensive grocers, Mrs. Salisbury. Of
+course, what they have is of the best, but they cater to the very
+richest families, you know--firms like Lewis & Sons aren't very much
+interested in the orders they receive from--well, from upper
+middle-class homes, people of moderate means. They handle hotels and
+the summer colony at Burning Woods."
+
+Justine paused, a little uncertain of her terms, and Mrs. Salisbury
+interposed an icy question.
+
+"May I ask where you HAVE transferred my trade?"
+
+"Not to any one place," the girl answered readily and mildly. But a
+little resentful color had crept into her cheeks. "I pay as I go, and
+follow the bargains," she explained. "I go to market twice a week, and
+send enough home to make it worth while for the tradesman. You couldn't
+market as I do, Mrs. Salisbury, but the tradespeople rather expect it
+of a maid. Sometimes I gather an assortment of vegetables into my
+basket, and get them to make a price on the whole. Or, if there is a
+sale at any store, I go there, and order a dozen cans, or twenty pounds
+of whatever they are selling."
+
+Mrs. Salisbury was not enjoying this revelation. The obnoxious term
+"upper middle class" was biting like an acid upon her pride. And it was
+further humiliating to contemplate her maid as a driver of bargains, as
+dickering for baskets of vegetables.
+
+"The best is always the cheapest in the long run, whatever it may cost,
+Justine," she said, with dignity. "We may not be among the richest
+families in town," she was unable to refrain from adding, "but it is
+rather amusing to hear you speak of the family as upper middle class!"
+
+"I only meant the--the sort of ordering we did," Justine hastily
+interposed. "I meant from the grocer's point of view."
+
+"Well, Mr. Lewis sold groceries to my grandmother before I was
+married," Mrs. Salisbury said loftily, "and I prefer him to any other
+grocer. If he is too far away, the order may be telephoned. Or give me
+your list, and I will stop in, as I used to do. Then I can order any
+little extra delicacy that I see, something I might not otherwise think
+of. Let me know what you need to-morrow morning, and I'll see to it."
+
+To her surprise, Justine did not bow an instant assent. Instead the
+girl looked a little troubled.
+
+"Shall I give you my accounts and my ledger?" she asked rather
+uncertainly.
+
+"No-o, I don't see any necessity for that," the older woman said, after
+a second's pause.
+
+"But Lewis & Sons is a very expensive place," Justine pursued; "they
+never have sales, never special prices. Their cheapest tomatoes are
+fifteen cents a can, and their peaches twenty-five--"
+
+"Never mind," Mrs. Salisbury interrupted her briskly. "We'll manage
+somehow. I always did trade there, and never had any trouble. Begin
+with him to-morrow. And, while, of course, I understand that I was ill
+and couldn't be bothered in this case, I want to ask you not to make
+any more changes without consulting me, if you please."
+
+Justine, still standing, her troubled eyes on her employer, the last
+glass, polished to diamond brightness, in her hand, frowned mutinously.
+
+"You understand that if you do any ordering whatever, Mrs. Salisbury, I
+will have to give up my budget. You see, in that case, I wouldn't know
+where I stood at all."
+
+"You would get the bill at the end of the month," Mrs. Salisbury said,
+displeased.
+
+"Yes, but I don't run bills," the girl persisted.
+
+"I don't care to discuss it, Justine," the mistress said pleasantly;
+"just do as I ask you, if you please, and we'll settle everything at
+the end of the month. You shall not be held responsible, I assure you."
+
+She went out of the kitchen, and the next morning had a pleasant half
+hour in the big grocery, and left a large order.
+
+"Just a little kitchen misunderstanding," she told the affable Mr.
+Lewis, "but when one is ill--However, I am rapidly getting the reins
+back into my own hands now."
+
+After that, Mrs. Salisbury ordered in person, or by telephone, every
+day, and Justine's responsibilities were confined to the meat market
+and greengrocer. Everything went along very smoothly until the end of
+the month, when Justine submitted her usual weekly account and a bill
+from Lewis & Sons which was some three times larger in amount than was
+the margin of money supposed to pay it.
+
+This was annoying. Mrs. Salisbury could not very well rebuke her, nor
+could she pay the bill out of her own purse. She determined to put it
+aside until her husband seemed in a mood for financial advances, and,
+wrapping it firmly about the inadequate notes and silver given her by
+Justine, she shut it in a desk drawer. There the bill remained,
+although the money was taken out for one thing or another; change that
+must be made, a small bill that must be paid at the door.
+
+Another fortnight went by, and Lewis & Sons submitted another bimonthly
+bill. Justine also gave her mistress another inadequate sum, what was
+left from her week's expenditures.
+
+The two grocery bills were for rather a formidable sum. The thought of
+them, in their desk drawer, rather worried Mrs. Salisbury. One evening
+she bravely told her husband about them, and laid them before him.
+
+Mr. Salisbury was annoyed. He had been free from these petty worries
+for some months, and he disliked their introduction again.
+
+"I thought this was Justine's business, Sally?" said he, frowning over
+his eyeglasses.
+
+"Well, it IS" said his wife, "but she hasn't enough money, apparently,
+and she simply handed me these, without saying anything."
+
+"Well, but that doesn't sound like her. Why?"
+
+"Oh, because I do the ordering, she says. They're queer, you know,
+Kane; all servants are. And she seems very touchy about it."
+
+"Nonsense!" said the head of the house roundly. "Oh, Justine!" he
+shouted, and the maid, after putting an inquiring head in from the
+dining-room, duly came in, and stood before him.
+
+"What's struck your budget that you were so proud of, Justine?" asked
+Kane Salisbury. "It looks pretty sick."
+
+"I am not keeping on a budget now," answered Justine, with a rather
+surprised glance at her mistress.
+
+"Not; but why not?" asked the man good-naturedly. And his wife added
+briskly, "Why did you stop, Justine?"
+
+"Because Mrs. Salisbury has been ordering all this month," Justine
+said. "And that, of course, makes it impossible for me to keep track of
+what is spent. These last four weeks I have only been keeping an
+account; I haven't attempted to keep within any limit."
+
+"Ah, you see that's it," Kane Salisbury said triumphantly. "Of course
+that's it! Well, Mrs. Salisbury will have to let you go back to the
+ordering then. D'ye see, Sally? Naturally, Justine can't do a thing
+while you're buying at random--"
+
+"My dear, we have dealt with Lewis & Sons ever since we were married,"
+Mrs. Salisbury said, smiling with great tolerance, and in a soothing
+voice, "Justine, for some reason, doesn't like Lewis & Sons--"
+
+"It isn't that," said the maid quickly. "It's just that it's against
+the rules of the college for anyone else to do any ordering, unless, of
+course, you and I discussed it beforehand and decided just what to
+spend."
+
+"You mean, unless I simply went to market for you?" asked the mistress,
+in a level tone.
+
+"Well, it amounts to that--yes."
+
+Mrs. Salisbury threw her husband one glance.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you what we have decided in the morning, Justine," she
+said, with dignity. "That's all. You needn't wait."
+
+Justine went back to her kitchen, and Mr. Salisbury, smiling, said:
+
+"Sally, how unreasonable you are! And how you do dislike that girl!"
+
+The outrageous injustice of this scattered to the winds Mrs.
+Salisbury's last vestige of calm, and, after one scathing summary of
+the case, she refused to discuss it at all, and opened the evening
+paper with marked deliberation.
+
+For the next two or three weeks she did all the marketing herself, but
+this plan did not work well. Bills doubled in size, and so many things
+were forgotten, or were ordered at the last instant by telephone, and
+arrived too late, that the whole domestic system was demoralized.
+
+Presently, of her own accord, Mrs. Salisbury reestablished Justine with
+her allowance, and with full authority to shop when and how she
+pleased, and peace fell again. But, smoldering in Mrs. Salisbury's
+bosom was a deep resentment at this peculiar and annoying state of
+affairs. She began to resent everything Justine did and said, as one
+human being shut up in the same house with another is very apt to do.
+
+No schooling ever made it easy to accept the sight of Justine's leisure
+when she herself was busy. It was always exasperating, when perhaps
+making beds upstairs, to glance from the window and see Justine
+starting for market, her handsome figure well displayed in her long
+dark coat, her shining braids half hidden by her simple yet dashing hat.
+
+"I walked home past Perry's," Justine would perhaps say on her return,
+"to see their prize chrysanthemums. They really are wonderful! The old
+man took me over the greenhouses himself, and showed me everything!"
+
+Or perhaps, unpacking her market basket by the spotless kitchen table,
+she would confide innocently:
+
+"Samuels is really having an extraordinary sale of serges this morning.
+I went in, and got two dress lengths for my sister's children. If I can
+find a good dressmaker, I really believe I'll have one myself. I
+think"--Justine would eye her vegetables thoughtfully--"I think I'll go
+up now and have my bath, and cook these later."
+
+Mrs. Salisbury could reasonably find no fault with this. But an
+indescribable irritation possessed her whenever such a conversation
+took place. The coolness!--she would say to herself, as she went
+upstairs--wandering about to shops and greenhouses, and quietly
+deciding to take a bath before luncheon! Why, Mrs. Salisbury had had
+maids who never once asked for the use of the bathroom, although they
+had been for months in her employ.
+
+No, she could not attack Justine on this score. But she began to
+entertain the girl with enthusiastic accounts of the domestics of
+earlier and better days.
+
+"My mother had a girl," she said, "a girl named Norah O'Connor. I
+remember her very well. She swept, she cleaned, she did the entire
+washing for a family of eight, and she did all the cooking. And such
+cookies, and pies, and gingerbread as she made! All for sixteen dollars
+a month. We regarded Norah as a member of the family, and, even on her
+holidays she would take three or four of us, and walk with us to my
+father's grave; that was all she wanted to do. You don't see her like
+in these days, dear old Norah!"
+
+Justine listened respectfully, silently. Once, when her mistress was
+enlarging upon the advantages of slavery, the girl commented mildly:
+
+"Doesn't it seem a pity that the women of the United States didn't
+attempt at least to train all those Southern colored people for house
+servants? It seems to be their natural element. They love to live in
+white families, and they have no caste pride. It would seem to be such
+a waste of good material, letting them worry along without much
+guidance all these years. It almost seems as if the Union owed it to
+them."
+
+"Dear me, I wish somebody would! I, for one, would love to have dear
+old mammies around me again," Mrs. Salisbury said, with fervor. "They
+know their place," she added neatly.
+
+"The men could be butlers and gardeners and coachmen," pursued Justine.
+
+"Yes, and with a lot of finely trained colored women in the market,
+where would you girls from the college be?" the other woman asked, not
+without a spice of mischievous enjoyment.
+
+"We would be a finer type of servant, for more fastidious people,"
+Justine scored by answering soberly. "You could hardly expect a colored
+girl to take the responsibility of much actual managing, I should
+suppose. There would always be a certain proportion of people who would
+prefer white servants."
+
+"Perhaps there are," Mrs. Salisbury admitted dubiously. She felt, with
+a sense of triumph, that she had given Justine a pretty strong hint
+against "uppishness." But Justine was innocently impervious to hints.
+As a matter of fact, she was not an exceptionally bright girl; literal,
+simple, and from very plain stock, she was merely well trained in her
+chosen profession. Sometimes she told her mistress of her
+fellow-graduates, taking it for granted that Mrs. Salisbury entirely
+approved of all the ways of the American School of Domestic Science.
+
+"There's Mabel Frost," said Justine one day. "She would have graduated
+when I did, but she took the fourth year's work. She really is of a
+very fine family; her father is a doctor. And she has a position with a
+doctor's family now, right near here, in New Troy. There are just two
+in family, and both are doctors, and away all day. So Mabel has a
+splendid chance to keep up her music."
+
+"Music?" Mrs. Salisbury asked sharply.
+
+"Piano. She's had lessons all her life. She plays very well, too."
+
+"Yes; and some day the doctor or his wife will come in and find her at
+the piano, and your friend will lose her fine position," Mrs. Salisbury
+suggested.
+
+"Oh, Mabel never would have touched the piano without their
+permission," Justine said quickly, with a little resentful flush.
+
+"You mean that they are perfectly willing to have her use it?" Mrs.
+Salisbury asked.
+
+"Oh, quite!"
+
+"Have they ADOPTED her?"
+
+"Oh, no! No; Mabel is twenty-four or five."
+
+"What's the doctor's name?"
+
+"Mitchell. Dr. Quentin Mitchell. He's a member of the Burning Woods
+Club."
+
+"A member of the CLUB! And he allows--" Mrs. Salisbury did not finish
+her thought. "I don't want to say anything against your friend," she
+began again presently, "but for a girl in her position to waste her
+time studying music seems rather absurd to me. I thought the very idea
+of the college was to content girls with household positions."
+
+"Well, she is going to be married next spring," Justine said, "and her
+husband is quite musical. He plays a church organ. I am going to dinner
+with them on Thursday, and then to the Gadski concert. They're both
+quite music mad."
+
+"Well, I hope he can afford to buy tickets for Gadski, but marriage is
+a pretty expensive business," Mrs. Salisbury said pleasantly, "What is
+he, a chauffeur--a salesman?" To do her justice, she knew the question
+would not offend, for Justine, like any girl from a small town, was not
+fastidious as to the position of her friends; was very fond of the
+policeman on the corner and his pretty wife, and liked a chat with Mrs.
+Sargent's chauffeur when occasion arose.
+
+But the girl's answer, in this case, was a masterly thrust.
+
+"No; he's something in a bank, Mrs. Salisbury. He's paying teller in
+that little bank at Burton Corners, beyond Burning Woods. But, of
+course, he hopes for promotion; they all do. I believe he is trying to
+get into the River Falls Mutual Savings, but I'm not sure."
+
+Mrs. Salisbury felt the blood in her face. Kane Salisbury had been in a
+bank when she married him; was cashier of the River Falls Mutual
+Savings Bank now.
+
+She carried away the asters she had been arranging, without further
+remark. But Justine's attitude rankled. Mrs. Salisbury, absurd as she
+felt her own position to be, could not ignore the impertinence of her
+maid's point of view. Theoretically, what Justine thought mattered less
+than nothing. Actually it really made a great difference to the
+mistress of the house.
+
+"I would like to put that girl in her place once!" thought Mrs.
+Salisbury. She began to wish that Justine would marry, and to envy
+those of her friends who were still struggling with untrained Maggies
+and Almas and Chloes. Whatever their faults, these girls were still
+SERVANTS, old-fashioned "help"--they drudged away at cooking and beds
+and sweeping all day, and rattled dishes far into the night.
+
+The possibility of getting a second little maid occurred to her. She
+suggested it, tentatively, to Sandy.
+
+"You couldn't, unless I'm mistaken, Mother," Sandy said briskly, eyeing
+a sandwich before she bit into it. The ladies were at luncheon. "For a
+graduate servant can't work with any but a graduate servant; that's the
+rule. At least I THINK it is!" And Sandy, turning toward the pantry,
+called: "Oh, Justine!"
+
+"Justine," she asked, when the maid appeared, "isn't it true that you
+graduates can't work with untrained girls in the house?"
+
+"That's the rule," Justine assented.
+
+"And what does the school expect you to pay a second girl?" pursued the
+daughter of the house.
+
+"Well, where there are no children, twenty dollars a month," said
+Justine, "with one dollar each for every person more than two in the
+family. Then, in that case, the head servant, as we call the cook,
+would get five dollars less a month. That is, I would get thirty-two
+dollars, and the assistant twenty-three."
+
+"Gracious!" said Mrs. Salisbury. "Thank you, Justine. We were just
+asking. Fifty-five dollars for the two!" she ejaculated under her
+breath when the girl was gone. "Why, I could get a fine cook and
+waitress for less than that!"
+
+And instantly the idea of two good maids instead of one graduated one
+possessed her. A fine cook in the kitchen, paid, say twenty-five, and a
+"second girl," paid sixteen. And none of these ridiculous and
+inflexible regulations! Ah, the satisfaction of healthily imposing upon
+a maid again, of rewarding that maid with the gift of a half-worn gown,
+as a peace offering--Mrs. Salisbury drew a long breath. The time had
+come for a change.
+
+Mr. Salisbury, however, routed the idea with scorn. His wife had no
+argument hardy enough to survive the blighting breath of his
+astonishment. And Alexandra, casually approached, proved likewise
+unfavorable.
+
+"I am certainly not furthering my own comfort alone in this, as you and
+Daddy seem inclined to think," Mrs. Salisbury said severely to her
+daughter. "I feel that Justine's system is an imposition upon you,
+dear. It isn't right for a pretty girl of your age to be caught dusting
+the sitting-room, as Owen caught you yesterday. Daddy and I can keep a
+nice home, we keep a motor car, we put the boys in good schools, and it
+doesn't seem fair--"
+
+"Oh, fair your grandmother!" Sandy broke in, with a breezy laugh. "If
+Owen Sargent doesn't like it, he can just come TO! Look at HIS mother,
+eating dinner the other day with four representatives of the
+Waitresses' Union! Marching in a parade with dear knows who! Besides--"
+
+"It is very different in Mrs. Sargent's case, dear," said Mrs.
+Salisbury simply. "She could afford to do anything, and consequently it
+doesn't matter what she does! It doesn't matter what you do, if you can
+afford not to. The point is that we can't really afford a second maid."
+
+"I don't see what that has to do with it!" said the girl of the coming
+generation cheerfully.
+
+"It has EVERYTHING to do with it," the woman of the passing generation
+answered seriously.
+
+"As far as Owen goes," Sandy went on thoughtfully, "I'm only too much
+afraid he's the other way. What do you suppose he's going to do now?
+He's going to establish a little Neighborhood House for boys down on
+River Street, 'The Cyrus Sargent Memorial.' And, if you please, he's
+going to LIVE there! It's a ducky house; he showed me the blue-prints,
+with the darlingest apartment for himself you ever saw, and a plunge,
+and a roof gymnasium. It's going to cost, endowment and all, three
+hundred thousand dollars--"
+
+"Good heavens!" Mrs. Salisbury said, as one stricken.
+
+"And the worst of it is," Alexandra pursued, with a sympathetic laugh
+for her mother's concern, "that he'll meet some Madonna-eyed little
+factory girl or laundry worker down there and feel that he owes it to
+her to--"
+
+"To break your heart, Sandy," the mother supplied, all tender
+solicitude.
+
+"It's not so much a question of my heart," Sandy answered composedly,
+"as it is a question of his entire life. It's so unnecessary and
+senseless!"
+
+"And you can sit there calmly discussing it!" Mrs. Salisbury said,
+thoroughly out of temper with the entire scheme of things mundane.
+"Upon my word, I never saw or heard anything like it!" she observed. "I
+wonder that you don't quietly tell Owen that you care for him--but it's
+too dreadful to joke about! I give you up!"
+
+And she rose from her chair, and went quickly out of the room, every
+line in her erect little figure expressing exasperation and
+inflexibility. Sandy, smiling sleepily, reopened an interrupted novel.
+But she stared over the open page into space for a few moments, and
+finally spoke:
+
+"Upon my word, I don't know that that's at all a bad idea!" an
+interrupted novel. But she stared over the open page into space for a
+few moments, and finally spoke:
+
+"Upon my word, I don't know that that's at all a bad idea!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+"Mrs. Salisbury," said Justine, when her mistress came into the kitchen
+one December morning, "I've had a note from Mrs. Sargent--"
+
+"From Mrs. Sargent?" Mrs. Salisbury repeated, astonished. And to
+herself she said: "She's trying to get Justine away from me!"
+
+"She writes as Chairman of the Department of Civics of the Forum Club,"
+pursued Justine, referring to the letter she held in her hand, "to ask
+me if I will address the club some Thursday on the subject of the
+College of Domestic Science. I know that you expect to give a card
+party some Thursday, and I thought I would make sure just which one you
+meant."
+
+Mrs. Salisbury, taken entirely unaware, was actually speechless for a
+moment. The Forum was, of all her clubs, the one in which membership
+was most prized by the women of River Falls. It was not a large club,
+and she had longed for many years somehow to place her name among the
+eighty on its roll. The richest and most exclusive women of River Falls
+belonged to the Forum Club; its few rooms, situated in the business
+part of town, and handsomely but plainly furnished, were full of subtle
+reminders that here was no mere social center; here responsible members
+of the recently enfranchised sex met to discuss civic betterment,
+schools and municipal budgets, commercialized vice and child labor,
+library appropriations, liquor laws and sewer systems. Local
+politicians were beginning to respect the Forum, local newspapers
+reported its conventions, printed its communications.
+
+Mrs. Salisbury was really a little bit out of place among the clever,
+serious young doctors, the architects, lawyers, philanthropists and
+writers who belonged to the club. But her membership therein was one of
+the things in which she felt an unalloyed satisfaction. If the
+discussions ever secretly bored or puzzled her, she was quite clever
+enough to conceal it. She sat, her handsome face, under its handsome
+hat, turned toward the speaker, her bright eyes immovable as she
+listened to reports and expositions. And, after the motion to adjourn
+had been duly made, she had her reward. Rich women, brilliant women,
+famous women chatted with her cordially as the Forum Club streamed
+downstairs. She was asked to luncheons, to teas; she was whirled home
+in the limousines of her fellow-members. No other one thing in her life
+seemed to Mrs. Salisbury as definite a social triumph as was her
+membership in the Forum.
+
+Her election had come about simply enough, after years of secret
+longing to become a member. Sandy, who was about twelve at the time,
+during a call from Mrs. Sargent, had said innocently:
+
+"Why haven't you ever joined the Forum, Mother?"
+
+"Why, yes; why not?" Mrs. Sargent had added.
+
+This gave Mrs. Salisbury an opportunity to say:
+
+"Well, I have been a very busy woman, and couldn't have done so, with
+these three dear children to watch. But, as a matter of fact, Mrs.
+Sargent, I have never been asked. At least," she went on scrupulously,
+"I am almost sure I never have been!" The implication being that the
+Forum's card of invitation might have been overlooked for more
+important affairs.
+
+"I'll send you another," the great lady had said at once. "You're just
+the sort we need," Mrs. Sargent had continued. "We've got enough widows
+and single women in now; what we want are the real mothers, who need
+shaking out of the groove!"
+
+Mrs. Sargent happened to be President of the Club at that time, so Mrs.
+Salisbury had only to ignore graciously the rather offensive phrasing
+of the invitation, and to await the news of her election, which duly
+and promptly arrived.
+
+And now Justine had been asked to speak at the Forum! It was the most
+distasteful bit of information that had come Mrs. Salisbury's way in a
+long, long time! She felt in her heart a stinging resentment against
+Mrs. Sargent, with her mad notions of equality, and against Justine,
+who was so complacently and contentedly accepting this monstrous state
+of affairs.
+
+"That is very kind of Mrs. Sargent," said she, fighting for dignity;
+"she is very much interested in working girls and their problems, and I
+suppose she thinks this might be a good advertisement for the school,
+too." This idea had just come to Mrs. Salisbury, and she found it
+vaguely soothing. "But I don't like the idea," she ended firmly;
+"it--it seems very odd, very--very conspicuous. I should prefer you not
+to consider anything of the kind."
+
+"I should prefer" was said in the tone that means "I command," yet
+Justine was not satisfied.
+
+"Oh, but why?" she asked.
+
+"If you force me to discuss it," said Mrs. Salisbury, in sudden anger,
+"because you are my maid! My gracious, YOU ARE MY MAID," she repeated,
+pent-up irritation finding an outlet at last. "There is such a
+relationship as mistress and maid, after all! While you are in my house
+you will do as I say. It is the mistress's place to give orders, not to
+take them, not to have to argue and defend herself--"
+
+"Certainly, if it is a question about the work the maid is supposed to
+do," Justine defended herself, with more spirit than the other woman
+had seen her show before. "But what she does with her leisure--why it's
+just the same as what a clerk does with his leisure, nobody questions
+it, nobody--"
+
+"I tell you that I will not stand here and argue with you," said Mrs.
+Salisbury, with more dignity in her tone than in her words. "I say that
+I don't care to have my maid exploited by a lot of fashionable women at
+a club, and that ends it! And I must add," she went on, "that I am
+extremely surprised that Mrs. Sargent should approach you in such a
+matter, without consulting me!"
+
+"The relationship of mistress and maid," Justine said slowly, "is what
+has always made the trouble. Men have decided what they want done in
+their offices, and never have any trouble in finding boys to fill the
+vacancies. But women expect--"
+
+"I really don't care to listen to any further theories from that
+extraordinary school," said Mrs. Salisbury decidedly. "I have told you
+what I expect you to do, and I know you are too sensible a girl to
+throw away a good position--"
+
+"Mrs. Salisbury, if I intended to say anything in such a little talk
+that would reflect on this family, or even to mention it, it would be
+different, but, as it is--"
+
+"I should hope you WOULDN'T mention this family!" Mrs. Salisbury said
+hotly. "But even without that--"
+
+"It would be merely an outline of what the school is, and what it tries
+to do," Justine interposed. "Miss Holley, our founder and President,
+was most anxious to have us interest the general public in this way, if
+ever we got a chance."
+
+"What Miss Holley--whoever she is--wanted, or wants, is nothing to me!"
+Mrs. Salisbury said magnificently. "You know what I feel about this
+matter, and I have nothing more to say."
+
+She left the kitchen on the very end of the last word, and Justine,
+perforce not answering, hoped that the affair was concluded, once and
+for all.
+
+"For Mrs. Sargent may think she can exasperate me by patronizing my
+maid," said Mrs. Salisbury guardedly, when telling her husband and
+daughter of the affair that evening, "but there is a limit to
+everything, and I have had about enough of this efficiency business!"
+
+"I can only beg, Mother dear, that you won't have a row with Owen's
+dear little vacillating, weak-minded ma," said Sandy cheerfully.
+
+"No; but, seriously, don't you both think it's outrageous?" Mrs.
+Salisbury asked, looking from one to the other.
+
+"No-o; I see the girl's point," Kane Salisbury said thoughtfully. "What
+she does with her afternoons off is her own affair, after all; and you
+can't blame her, if a chance to step out of the groove comes along, for
+taking advantage of it. Strictly, you have no call to interfere."
+
+"Legally, perhaps I haven't," his wife conceded calmly. "But, thank
+goodness, my home is not yet a court of law. Besides, Daddy, if one of
+the young men in the bank did something of which you disapproved, you
+would feel privileged to interfere."
+
+"If he did something WRONG, Sally, not otherwise."
+
+"And you would be perfectly satisfied to meet your janitor somewhere at
+dinner?"
+
+"No; the janitor's colored, to begin with, and, more than that, he
+isn't the type one meets. But, if he qualified otherwise, I wouldn't
+mind meeting him just because he happened to be the janitor. Now, young
+Forrest turns up at the club for golf, and Sandy and I picked Fred Hall
+up the other day, coming back from the river." Kane Salisbury, leaning
+back in his chair, watched the rings of smoke that rose from his cigar.
+"It's a funny thing about you women," he said lazily. "You keep
+wondering why smart girls won't go into housework, and yet, if you get
+a girl who isn't a mere stupid machine, you resent every sign she gives
+of being an intelligent human being. No two of you keep house alike,
+and you jump on the girl the instant she hangs a dish towel up the way
+you don't. It's you women who make life so hard for each other. Now, if
+any decent man saw a young fellow at the bottom of the ladder, who was
+as good and clever and industrious as Justine is, he'd be glad to give
+him a hand up. But no; that means she's above her work, and has to be
+snubbed."
+
+"Don't talk so cynically, Daddy dear," Mrs. Salisbury said, smiling
+over her fancy work, as one only half listening.
+
+"I tell you, a change is coming in all these things, Sally," said the
+cynic, unruffled.
+
+"You bet there is!" his daughter seconded him from the favorite low
+seat that permitted her to rest her mouse-colored head against his knee.
+
+"Your mother's a conservative, Sandy," pursued the man of the house,
+encouraged, "but there's going to be some domestic revolutionizing in
+the next few years. It's hard enough to get a maid now; pretty soon
+it'll be impossible. Then you women will have to sit down and work the
+thing out, and ask yourselves why young American girls won't come into
+your homes, and eat the best food in the land, and get well paid for
+what they do. You'll have to reduce the work of an American home to a
+system, that's all, and what you want done that isn't provided for in
+that system you'll have to do yourselves. There's something in the way
+you treat a girl now, or in what you expect her to do, that's all
+wrong!"
+
+"It isn't a question of too much work," Mrs. Salisbury said. "They are
+much better off when they're worked hard. And I notice that your
+bookkeepers are kept pretty busy, Kane," she added neatly.
+
+"For an eight-hour day, Sally. But you expect a twelve or fourteen-hour
+day from your housemaid--"
+
+"If I pay a maid thirty-seven and a half dollars a month," his wife
+averred, with precision, "I expect her to do something for that
+thirty-seven dollars and a half!"
+
+"Well, but, Mother, she does!" Alexandra contributed eagerly. "In
+Justine's case she does an awful lot! She plans, and saves, and thinks
+about things. Sometimes she sits writing menus and crossing things out
+for an hour at a time."
+
+"And then Justine's a pioneer; in a way she's an experiment," the man
+said. "Experiments are always expensive. That's why the club is
+interested, I suppose. But in a few years probably the woods will be
+full of graduate servants--everyone'll have one! They'll have their
+clubs and their plans together, and that will solve some of the social
+side of the old trouble. They--"
+
+"Still, I notice that Mrs. Sargent herself doesn't employ graduate
+servants!" Mrs. Salisbury, who had been following a wandering line of
+thought, threw in darkly.
+
+"Because they haven't any graduates for homes like hers, Mother,"
+Alexandra supplied. "She keeps eight or nine housemaids. The college is
+only to supply the average home, don't you see? Where only one or two
+are kept--that's their idea."
+
+"And do they suppose that the average American woman is willing to go
+right on paying thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents for a maid?" Mrs.
+Salisbury asked mildly.
+
+"For five in family, Mother! Justine would only be thirty if three dear
+little strangers hadn't come to brighten your home," Sandy reminded
+her. "Besides," she went on, "Justine was telling me only a day or two
+ago of their latest scheme--they are arranging so that a girl can
+manage two houses in the same neighborhood. She gets breakfast for the
+Joneses, say; leaves at nine for market; orders for both families; goes
+to the Smiths and serves their hearty meal at noon; goes back to the
+Joneses at five, and serves dinner."
+
+"And what does she get for all this?" Mrs. Salisbury asked in a
+skeptical tone.
+
+"The Joneses pay her twenty-five, I believe, and the Smiths fifteen for
+two in each family."
+
+"What's to prevent the two families having all meals together," Mrs.
+Salisbury asked, "instead of having to patch out with meals when they
+had no maid?"
+
+"Well, I suppose they could. Then she'd get her original thirty, and
+five more for the two extra--you see, it comes out the same,
+thirty-five dollars a month. Perhaps families will pool their expenses
+that way some day. It would save buying, too, and table linen, and gas
+and fuel. And it would be fun! All at our house this month, and all at
+Aunt Mat's next month!"
+
+"There's one serious objection to sharing a maid," Mrs. Salisbury
+presently submitted; "she would tell the other family all your private
+business."
+
+"If they chose to pump her, she might," Alexandra said, with
+unintentional rebuke, and Mr. Salisbury added amusedly:
+
+"No, no, no, Mother! That's an exploded theory. How much has Justine
+told you of her last place?"
+
+"But that's no proof she WOULDN'T, Kane," Mrs. Salisbury ended the talk
+by rising from her chair, taking another nearer the reading lamp, and
+opening a new magazine. "Justine is a sensible girl," she added, after
+a moment. "I have always said that. When all the discussing and
+theorizing in the world is done, it comes down to this: a servant in my
+house shall do AS I SAY. I have told her that I dislike this ridiculous
+club idea, and I expect to hear no more of the matter!"
+
+There came a day in December when Mrs. Salisbury came home from the
+Forum Club in mid-afternoon. Her face was a little pale as she entered
+the house, her lips tightly set. It was a Thursday afternoon, and
+Justine's kitchen was empty. Lettuce and peeled potatoes were growing
+crisp in yellow bowls of ice water, breaded cutlets were in the ice
+chest, a custard cooled in a north window.
+
+Mrs. Salisbury walked rapidly through the lower rooms, came back to the
+library, and sat down at her desk. A fire was laid in the wide,
+comfortable fireplace, but she did not light it. She sat, hatted,
+veiled and gloved, staring fixedly ahead of her for some moments. Then
+she said aloud, in a firm but quiet voice: "Well, this positively ENDS
+it!"
+
+A delicate film of dust obscured the shining surface of the writing
+table. Mrs. Salisbury's mouth curved into a cold smile when she saw it;
+and again she spoke aloud.
+
+"Thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents, indeed!" she said. "Ha!"
+
+Nearly two hours later Alexandra rushed in. Alexandra looked her
+prettiest; she was wearing new furs for the first time; her face was
+radiantly fresh, under the sweep of her velvet hat. She found her
+mother stretched comfortably on the library couch with a book. Mrs.
+Salisbury smiled, and there was a certain placid triumph in her smile.
+
+"Here you are, Mother!" Alexandra burst out joyously. "Mother, I've
+just had the most extraordinary experience of my life!" She sat down
+beside the couch, her eyes dancing, her cheeks two roses, and pushed
+back her furs, and flung her gloves aside. "My dear," said Alexandra,
+catching up the bunch of violets she held for an ecstatic sniff, and
+then dropping it in her lap again, "wait until I tell you--I'm engaged!"
+
+"My darling girl--" Mrs. Salisbury said, rapturously, faintly.
+
+"To Owen, of course," Alexandra rushed on radiantly. "But wait until I
+tell you! It's the most awful thing I ever did in my life, in a WAY,"
+she interrupted herself to say more soberly. Her voice died away, and
+her eyes grew dreamy.
+
+Mrs. Salisbury's heart, rising giddily to heaven on a swift rush of
+thanks, felt a cold check.
+
+"How do you mean awful, dear?" she said apprehensively.
+
+"Well, wait, and I'll tell you," Alexandra said, recalled and dimpling
+again. "I met Jim Vance and Owen this morning at about twelve, and Jim
+simply got red as a beet, and vanished--poor Jim!" The girl paid the
+tribute of a little sigh to the discarded suitor. "So then Owen asked
+me to lunch with him--right there in the Women's exchange, so it was
+quite comme il faut, Mother," she pursued, "and, my dear! he told me,
+as calmly as THAT!--that he might go to New York when Jim goes--Jim's
+going to visit a lot of Eastern relatives!--so that he, Owen I mean,
+could study some Eastern settlement houses and get some ideas--"
+
+"I think the country is going mad on this subject of settlement houses,
+and reforms, and hygiene!" Mrs. Salisbury said, with some sharpness.
+"However, go on!"
+
+"Well, Owen spoke to me a little about--about Jim's liking me, you
+know," Alexandra continued. "You know Owen can get awfully red and
+choky over a thing like that," she broke off to say animatedly. "But
+to-day he wasn't--he was just brotherly and sweet. And, Mother, he got
+so confidential, you know, that I simply PULLED my courage together,
+and I determined to talk honestly to him. I clasped my hands--I could
+see in one of the mirrors that I looked awfully nice, and that
+helped!--I clasped my hands, and I looked right into his eyes, and I
+said, quietly, you know, 'Owen,' I said 'I'm going to tell you the
+truth. You ask me why I don't care for Jim; this is the reason. I like
+you too much to care for any other man that way. I don't want you to
+say anything now, Owen,' I said, 'or to think I expect you to tell me
+that you have always cared for me. That'd be too FLAT. And I'm not
+going to say that I'll never care for anyone else, for I'm only twenty,
+and I don't know. But I couldn't see so much of you, Owen,' I said,
+'and not care for you, and it seems as natural to tell you so as it
+would for me to tell another girl. You worry sometimes because you
+can't remember your father,' I said, 'and because your mother is so
+undemonstrative with you; but I want you to think, the next time you
+feel sort of out of it, that there is a woman who really and truly
+thinks that you are the best man in the world--'"
+
+Mrs. Salisbury had risen to a sitting position; her eyes, fixed upon
+her daughter's face, were filled with utter horror.
+
+"You are not serious, my child!" she gasped. "Alexandra, tell me that
+this is some monstrous joke--"
+
+"Serious! I never was more serious in my life," the girl said stoutly.
+"I said just that. It was easy enough, after I once got started. And I
+thought to myself, even then, that if he didn't care he'd be decent
+enough to say so honestly--"
+
+"But, my child--my CHILD!" the mother said, beside herself with
+outraged pride. "You cannot mean that you so far forgot a woman's
+natural delicacy--her natural shrinking--her dignity--Why, what must
+Owen think of you! Can't you SEE what a dreadful thing you've done,
+dear!" Her mind, working desperately for an escape from the unbearable
+situation, seized upon a possible explanation. "My darling," she said,
+"you must try at once to convince him that you were only joking--you
+can say half-laughingly--"
+
+"But wait!" Alexandra interrupted, unruffled. "He put his hand over
+mine, and he turned as red as a beet--I wish you could have seen his
+face, Mother!--and he said--But," and the happy color flooded her face,
+"I honestly can't tell you what he said, Mother," Alexandra confessed.
+"Only it was DARLING, and he is honestly the best man I ever saw in my
+life!"
+
+"But, dearest, dearest," her mother said, with desperate appeal. "Don't
+you see that you can't possibly allow things to remain this way? Your
+dignity, dear, the most precious thing a girl has, you've simply thrown
+it to the winds! Do you want Owen to remind you some day that YOU were
+the one to speak first?" Her voice sank distressfully, a shamed red
+burned in her cheeks. "Do you want Owen to be able to say that you
+cared, and admitted that you cared, before he did?"
+
+Alexandra, staring blankly at her mother, now burst into a gay laugh.
+
+"Oh, Mother, aren't you DARLING--but you're so funny!" she said. "Don't
+you suppose I know Owen well enough to know whether he cares for me or
+not? He doesn't know it himself, that's the whole point, or rather he
+DIDN'T, for he does now! And he'll go on caring more and more every
+minute, you'll see! He might have been months finding it out, even if
+he didn't go off to New York with Jim, and marry some little designing
+dolly-mop of an actress, or some girl he met on the train. Owen's the
+sort of dear, big, old, blundering fellow that you have to PROTECT,
+Mother. And it came up so naturally--if you'd been there--"
+
+"I thank Heaven I was not there!" Mrs. Salisbury said feelingly. "Came
+up naturally! Alexandra, what are you MADE of? Where are your natural
+feelings? Why, do you realize that your Grandmother Porter kept your
+grandfather waiting three months for an answer, even? She lived to be
+an old, old lady, and she used to say that a woman ought never let her
+husband know how much she cared for him, and Grandfather Porter
+RESPECTED and ADMIRED your grandmother until the day of her death!"
+
+"A dear, cold-blooded old lady she must have been!" said Alexandra,
+unimpressed.
+
+"On the contrary," Mrs. Salisbury said quickly. "She was a beautiful
+and dignified woman. And when your father first began to call upon me,"
+she went on impressively, "and Mattie teased me about him, I was so
+furious--my feelings were so outraged!--that I went upstairs and cried
+a whole evening, and wouldn't see him for DAYS!"
+
+"Well, dearest," Alexandra said cheerfully, "You may have been a
+perfect little lady, but it's painfully evident that I take after the
+other side of the house! As for Owen ever having the nerve to suggest
+that I gave him a pretty broad hint--" the girl's voice was carried
+away on a gale of cheerful laughter. "He'd get no dessert for weeks to
+come!" she threatened gaily. "You know I'm convinced, Mother," Sandy
+went on more seriously, "that this business of a man's doing all the
+asking is going out. When women have their own industrial freedom, and
+their own well-paid work, it'll be a great compliment to suggest to a
+man that one's willing to give everything up, and keep his house and
+raise his children for him. And if, for any reason, he SHOULDN'T care
+for that girl, she'll not be embarrassed--"
+
+Mrs. Salisbury shut her eyes, her face and form rigid, one hand
+spasmodically clutching the couch.
+
+"Alexandra, I BEG--" she said faintly, "I ENTREAT that you will not
+expect me to listen to such outrageous and indelicate and COARSE--yes,
+coarse!--theories! Think what you will, but don't ask your mother--"
+
+"Now, listen, darling," Alexandra said soothingly, kneeling down and
+gathering her mother affectionately in her arms, "Owen did every bit of
+this except the very first second and, if you'll just FORGET IT, in a
+few months he'll be thinking he did it all! Wait until you see him;
+he's walking on air! He's dazed. My dear"--the strain of happy
+confidence was running smoothly again--"my dear, we lunched together,
+and then we went out in the car to Burning Woods, and sat there on the
+porch, and talked and TALKED. It was perfectly wonderful! Now, he's
+gone to tell his mother, but he's coming back to take us all to dinner.
+Is that all right? And, Mother, that reminds me, we are going to live
+in the new Settlement House, and have a girl like Justine!"
+
+"WHAT!" Mrs. Salisbury said, smitten sick with disappointment.
+
+"Or Justine herself, if you'll let us have her," Sandy went on. "You
+see, living in that big Sargent house--"
+
+"Do you mean that Owen's mother doesn't want to give up that house?"
+Mrs. Salisbury asked coldly. "I thought it was Owen's?"
+
+"It IS Owen's, Mother, but fancy living there!" Sandy said vivaciously.
+"Why, I'd have to keep seven or eight maids, and do nothing but manage
+them, and do just as everyone else does!"
+
+"You'd be the richest young matron in town," her mother said bitterly.
+
+"Oh, I know, Mother, but that seems sort of mean to the other girls!
+Anyway, we'd much rather live in the ducky little Settlement house, and
+entertain our friends at the Club, do you see? And Justine is to run a
+little cooking school, do you see? For everyone says that management of
+food and money is the most important thing to teach the poorer class.
+Won't that be great?"
+
+"I personally can't agree with you," the mother said lifelessly. "Here
+I spend all my life since your babyhood trying to make friends for you
+among the nicest people, trying to establish our family upon an equal
+basis with much richer people, and you, instead of living as you
+should, with beautiful things about you, choose to go down to River
+Street, and drudge among the slums!"
+
+"Oh, come, Mother; River Street is the breeziest, prettiest part of
+town, with the river and those fields opposite. Wait until we clean it
+up, and get some gardens going--"
+
+"As for Justine, I am DONE with her," continued the older woman
+dispassionately. "All this has rather put it out of my head, but I
+meant to tell you at once, she goes out of my house THIS WEEK! Against
+my express wish, she was the guest of the Forum Club to-day. 'Miss J.
+C. Harrison,' the program said, and I could hardly believe my eyes when
+I saw Justine! She had on a black charmeuse gown, black velvet about
+her hair--and I was supposed to sit there and listen to my own maid! I
+slipped out; it was too much. To-morrow morning," Mrs. Salisbury ended
+dramatically, "I dismiss her!"
+
+"Mother!" said Alexandra, aghast. "What reason will you give her?"
+
+"I shall give her no reason," Mrs. Salisbury said sternly. "I am
+through with apologies to servants! To-morrow I shall apply at Crosby's
+for a good, old-fashioned maid, who doesn't have to have her daily
+bath, and doesn't expect to be entertained at my club!"
+
+"But, listen, darling," Alexandra pleaded. "DON'T make a fuss now.
+Justine was my darling belle-mere's guest to-day, don't you see? It'll
+be so awkward, scrapping right in the face of Owen's news. Couldn't you
+sort of shelve the Justine question for a while?"
+
+"Dearie, be advised," Mrs. Salisbury said, with solemn warning. "You
+DON'T want a girl like that, dear. You will be a SOMEBODY, Sandy. You
+can't do just what any other girl would do, as Owen Sargent's wife!
+Don't live with Mrs. Sargent if you don't want to, but take a pretty
+house, dear. Have two or three little maids, in nice caps and aprons.
+Why, Alice Snow, whose husband is merely an automobile salesman, has a
+LOVELY home! It's small, of course, but you could have your choice!"
+
+"Well, nothing's settled!" Alexandra rose to go upstairs, gathered her
+furs about her. "Only promise me to let Justine's question stand," she
+begged.
+
+"Well," Mrs. Salisbury consented unwillingly.
+
+"Ah, there's Dad!" Alexandra cried suddenly, as the front door opened
+and shut. With a joyous rush, she flew to meet him, and Mrs. Salisbury
+could imagine, from the sounds she heard, exactly how Sandy and her
+great news and her furs and her father's kisses were all mixed up
+together. "What--what--what--why, what am I going to do for a girl?"
+"Oh, Dad, darling, say that you're glad!" "Luckiest fellow this side of
+the Rocky Mountains, and I'll tell him so!" "And you and Mother to dine
+with us every week, promise that, Dad!"
+
+She heard them settle down on the lowest step, Sandy obviously in her
+father's lap; heard the steady murmur of confidence and advice.
+
+"Wise girl, wise girl," she heard the man's voice say. "That keeps you
+in touch with life, Sandy; that's real. And then, if some day you have
+reasons for wanting a bigger house and a more quiet neighborhood--"
+Several frantic kisses interrupted the speaker here, but he presently
+went on: "Why, you can always move! Meantime, you and Owen are helping
+less fortunate people, you're building up a lot of wonderful
+associations--"
+
+Well, it was all probably for the best; it would turn out quite
+satisfactorily for everyone, thought the mother, sitting in the
+darkening library, and staring rather drearily before her. Sandy would
+have children, and children must have big rooms and sunshine, if it can
+be managed possibly. The young Sargents would fall nicely into line, as
+householders, as parents, as hospitable members of society.
+
+But it was all so different from her dreams, of a giddy, spoiled Sandy,
+the petted wife of an adoring rich man; a Sandy despotically and yet
+generously ruling servants, not consulting Justine as an equal, in a
+world of working women--
+
+And she was not even to have the satisfaction of discharging Justine!
+The maid had her rights, her place in the scheme of things, her pride.
+
+"I declare, times have changed!" Mrs. Salisbury said to herself
+involuntarily. She mused over the well-worn phrase; she had never used
+it herself before; its truth struck her forcibly for the first time.
+
+"I remember my mother saying that," thought she, "and how old-fashioned
+and conventional we thought her! I remember she said it when Mat and I
+went to dances, after we were married; it seemed almost wrong to her!
+Dear me! And I remember Ma's horror when Mat went to a hospital for her
+first baby. 'If there is a thing that belongs at home,' Ma said, 'it
+does seem to me it's a baby!' And my asking people to dinner by
+telephone, and the Fosters having two bathrooms in their house--Ma
+thought that such a ridiculous affectation! But what WOULD she say now?
+For those things were only trifles, after all," Mrs. Salisbury sighed,
+in all honesty. "But NOW, why, the world is simply being turned upside
+down with these crazy new notions!" And again she paused, surprised to
+hear herself using another old, familiar phrase. "Ma used to say that
+very thing, too," said Mrs. Salisbury to herself. "Poor Ma!"
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Treasure, by Kathleen Norris
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