g me to
mind the front door, and enabling us both to acquire proficiency in
the art of helping ourselves at dinner, there's a fireman's ball or
a policeman's hop or a letter-carriers' theatre party going on
somewhere in the county, and it's my belief the worshipping she does
on these occasions is at the shrine of Terpsichore or that of
Melpomene, which is a heathen custom and not to be tolerated here.
If she's so fond of living in church we can quote to her Hamlet's
advice to Ophelia--'Get thee to a nunnery!' Why, Bess, I was
mortified to death the other night when Bradley dined here, he's all
the time bragging about his menagerie, and I tried to bluff him out
and make him believe we were waited on by angels in disguise, and
you know what happened. He came, saw, and I was regularly knocked
out. You let us in; we waited on ourselves; cook had prepared the
seven-o'clock dinner at five to give her a chance to go to the
hospital to see her brother-in-law with the measles; John had one of
his Central-African fires on, and Bradley's laughing about it yet."

"Mr. Bradley was very disagreeable the other night, anyhow," sniffed
Bessie. "He acted as if he were camping out!"

"Well, I can't honestly say I blame him for that," retorted
Thaddeus. "It only needed a balsam bed and a hole in the roof to
let the rain in on him to complete the illusion."

Finally, December came, and the tendencies of absenteeism on the
part of the servants showed no signs of abatement. They were
remonstrated with, but it made no difference. They didn't go out,
they declared, because they wanted to, but because they had to.
Cook couldn't let her relatives go unattended. Mary's religious
scruples simply dragged her out of the house, try as she would to
stay in; and as for John, as long as Dennis was on hand to take his
place he couldn't see why Mr. Perkins was dissatisfied. To tell the
truth, John had recently imbibed some more or less capitalistic--or
anticapitalistic--doctrines, and he was quite incapable of
understanding why, if a street-contractor, for instance, was
permitted by the laws of the land to sublet the work for which he
had contracted, he, John, should not be permitted to sublet his
contract to Dennis, piecemeal, or even as a whole, if he saw fit to
do so.

Thaddeus, seeing that Bessie was very much upset by the condition of
affairs, had said little about it since Thanksgiving Day, when he
had said about as much as the subject