path: root/old/trsur10.txt

The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Treasure, by Kathleen Norris
#2 in our series by Kathleen Norris

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before distributing this or any other
Project Gutenberg file.

We encourage you to keep this file, exactly as it is, on your
own disk, thereby keeping an electronic path open for future
readers.  Please do not remove this.

This header should be the first thing seen when anyone starts to
view the etext. Do not change or edit it without written permission.
The words are carefully chosen to provide users with the
information they need to understand what they may and may not
do with the etext.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These Etexts Are Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****

Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get etexts, and
further information, is included below.  We need your donations.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541



Title: The Treasure

Author: Kathleen Norris

Release Date: July, 2003 [Etext# 4211]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on December 11, 2001]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Treasure, by Kathleen Norris
*****This file should be named trsur10.txt or trsur10.zip******

Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, trsur11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, trsur10a.txt

Produced by Charles Franks
         and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
keep etexts in compliance with any particular paper edition.

We are now trying to release all our etexts one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
even years after the official publication date.

Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.

Most people start at our sites at:
http://gutenberg.net or
http://promo.net/pg

These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
etexts, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).


Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement
can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.

http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03

Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90

Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour in 2001 as we release over 50 new Etext
files per month, or 500 more Etexts in 2000 for a total of 4000+
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
should reach over 300 billion Etexts given away by year's end.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.

At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 4,000 Etexts.  We need
funding, as well as continued efforts by volunteers, to maintain
or increase our production and reach our goals.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.

We need your donations more than ever!

As of November, 2001, contributions are being solicited from people
and organizations in: Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware,
Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky,
Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon,
Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee,
Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin,
and Wyoming.

*In Progress

We have filed in about 45 states now, but these are the only ones
that have responded.

As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.

In answer to various questions we have received on this:

We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
just ask.

While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
donate.

International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
ways.

All donations should be made to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109

Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
method other than by check or money order.


The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fundraising
requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
made and fundraising will begin in the additional states.

We need your donations more than ever!

You can get up to date donation information at:

http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html


***

If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
you can always email directly to:

Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>

Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.

We would prefer to send you information by email.


**The Legal Small Print**


(Three Pages)

***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.

To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims
all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this etext,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext,
or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word
     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
     let us know your plans and to work out the details.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.

The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
Money should be paid to the:
"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
hart@pobox.com

[Portions of this header are copyright (C) 2001 by Michael S. Hart
and may be reprinted only when these Etexts are free of all fees.]
[Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be used in any sales
of Project Gutenberg Etexts or other materials be they hardware or
software or any other related product without express permission.]

*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.10/04/01*END*






Produced by Charles Franks
         and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




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 Etext of The Treasure, by Kathleen Norris