alone and stop worriting. It's like your impidence to turn my
lady-friends out of this flat. It's like your impidence. I'll--"

Letitia's crestfallen look, following upon her perturbation, completely
upset me. A wave of indignation swamped me. I advanced, and in another
minute Miss Gerda Lyberg would have found herself in the hall, impelled
there by a persuasive hand upon her shoulder. However, it was not to be.

"You just lay a hand on me," she said with cold deliberation, and a
smile, "and I'll have you arrested for assault. Oh, I know the law. I
haven't been in this country fifteen years for nothing. The law looks
after poor weak, Swedish girls. Just push me out. It's all I ask. Just
you push me out."

She edged up to me defiantly. My blood boiled. I would have mortgaged
the prospects of my _Lives of Great Men_ (not that they were worth
mortgaging) for the exquisite satisfaction of confounding this
abominable woman. Then I saw the peril of the situation. I thought of
horrid headliners in the papers: "Author charged with abusing servant
girl," or, "Arrest of Archibald Fairfax on serious charge," and my mood
changed.

"I understood you all the time," continued Miss Lyberg insultingly. "I
listened to you. I knew what you thought of me. Now I'm telling you what
I think of you. The idea of turning out my lady-friends, on a Thursday
night, too! And me a-slaving for them, and a-bathing for them, and
a-treating them to ice cream and cake, and in me own kitchen. You ain't
no lady. As for you"--I seemed to be her particular pet--"when I sees a
man around the house all the time, a-molly-coddling and a-fussing, I
says to myself, he ain't much good if he can't trust the women folk
alone."

We stood there like dummies, listening to the tirade. What could we do?
To be sure, there were two of us, and we were in our own house. The
antagonist, however, was a servant, not in her own house. The situation,
for reasons that it is impossible to define, was hers. She knew it, too.
We allowed her full sway, because we couldn't help it. The sympathy of
the public, in case of violent measures, would not have been on our
side. The poor domestic, oppressed and enslaved, would have appealed to
any jury of married men, living luxuriously in cheap boarding-houses!

When she left us, as she did when she was completely ready to do so,
Letitia began to cry. The sight of her tears unnerved me, and I checked
a most unfeeling remark that I intende