new teeth unto view.

"Alas!" cried Thaddeus, "our butleress has evoluted backwards. She
grins like an ordinary waitress."

It was too true. The possession of brilliantly white teeth seemed
to have brought with it a desire to show them, which was destructive
of that dignity with which Jane had previously been hedged about,
and substituted for it a less desirable atmosphere of possible
familiarity, which might grow upon very slight provocation into
intimacy, not to mention a nearer approach to social equality.

"I don't suppose we can blame her exactly," said Perkins, when
discussing one or two of Jane's lapses from her old-time standard.
"I haven't a doubt that if I'd gone for years without teeth, I'd
become a regular Cheshire cat, with a new, complete edition de luxe
of celluloid molars. Still, I wish she'd paid more attention to the
dinner and less to Mr. Barlow's conversation last night. She stood
a whole minute, with the salad-bowl in her hand, waiting for him to
reach the point of his story about the plumber who put a gas-pipe
through Shakespeare's tenor in Westminster Abbey, and when he
finished, and she smiled, you'd have thought a dozen gravestones to
the deceased's memory had been conjured up before us."

"It's a small fault, Thaddeus," returned Mrs. Perkins, "but I'll
speak to her about it."

"Oh, I wouldn't," said Perkins; "let it go; she means well, and when
we got her we didn't suspect she'd turn out such a jewel. She's
merely approaching her norm, that is all. We ought to be thankful
to have had such perfection for one year. It's too bad it couldn't
continue; but what perfection does?"

Nothing, therefore, was said, and Jane smiled on, yet waited most
acceptably and kept all things decently and in order--for a little
while. Along about Christmas-time a further decadence and
additional flaw in the jewel was discovered, and it was Perkins
himself who discovered it. It happened one day while he was at work
alone in the house, Mrs. Perkins having gone out shopping. A friend
from Boston appeared--a friend interested in bric-a-brac and china
generally. Thaddeus, to whom a luncheon in solitary grandeur was
little short of abomination, invited his Boston friend to stay and
share pot-luck with him, knowing, hypocrite that he was, that pot-
luck did not mean pot-luck at all, but a course luncheon which many
men would have found all-sufficient at dinner. The Boston friend
accepted, and the lunch