nths 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 a