The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Treasure, by Kathleen Norris
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Title: The Treasure
Author: Kathleen Norris
Posting Date: July 7, 2009 [EBook #4211]
Release Date: July, 2003
First Posted: December 11, 2001
Language: English
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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
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