ck to her dusting. She
looked at me compassionately.

"It's the way that dummed company takes to get people to pay their
deposits promptly," she said. "But trust Mary Jane Few Clothes to get
ahead of a little trick like that! My, Missis, isn't it hot!"

I went back to my letter-writing feeling somewhat pensive. It was
clear that we had a competent person in the kitchen, and as for myself
it would not disturb me in the least if she managed me, provided she
dealt as peremptorily with the housework as she handled any other
difficult proposition. But with the Angel? I was not very well
acquainted with my husband myself, and I was slightly exercised as to
whether he would bow his neck to Mary's yoke as meekly as I intended to
do or not. I seemed to feel intuitively that Mary was a great and
gallant general in the domestic field, and my mother's thirty years'
war with incompetent servants made me yearn to close my lips as
hermetically as an army officer's and blindly obey my general's orders
with an unquestioning confidence that the battle would be won by her
genius. If it were lost, then it would be my turn to interfere and
criticize and show how affairs should have been managed.

But men, as a rule, have no such intuition, and I wondered about the
Angel. How little I knew him!

I was arranging the flowers for the table when the Angel came home.
When he had gone back to dress, Mary came up to me and in a
confidential way said:

"Missis, dear, don't tell your father about the electric light till
after dinner,--excuse me for putting in my two cents, but I always was
nosey!"

"Tell my father?" I repeated. My father was in Washington.

"Boss! Mr. Jardine!" explained Mary.

"Why did you call him my father? Surely you must know--"

"Pardon me, dear child. I always call him your father when I'm talking
to myself, because nobody but your father could be as careful of you as
that dear man!"

I sat down to laugh.

"You don't believe much in husbands, then?" I said.

"Saving your presence, that I don't. I believe in fathers, and so I
always call that blessed man your father. Will you believe it, Missis,
he wouldn't let me reach up to take the globes off to clean them, nor
lift the five-gallon water-bottle when it came in full from the grocer.
He treats my white hairs as if they were his mother's--God love him!"

I listened to Mary with a dubious mind, divided between admiration of
the Angel and the inten