“Oh, fair your grandmother!” Sandy broke in, with a breezy laugh.  “If Owen Sargent doesn’t like it, he can just come to!  Look at his mother, eating dinner the other day with four representatives of the Waitresses’ Union!  Marching in a parade with dear knows who!  Besides—­”

“It is very different in Mrs. Sargent’s case, dear,” said Mrs. Salisbury simply.  “She could afford to do anything, and consequently it doesn’t matter what she does!  It doesn’t matter what you do, if you can afford not to.  The point is that we can’t really afford a second maid.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with it!” said the girl of the coming generation cheerfully.

“It has everything to do with it,” the woman of the passing generation answered seriously.

“As far as Owen goes,” Sandy went on thoughtfully, “I’m only too much afraid he’s the other way.  What do you suppose he’s going to do now?  He’s going to establish a little Neighborhood House for boys down on River Street, ‘The Cyrus Sargent Memorial.’  And, if you please, he’s going to live there!  It’s a ducky house; he showed me the blue-prints, with the darlingest apartment for himself you ever saw, and a plunge, and a roof gymnasium.  It’s going to cost, endowment and all, three hundred thousand dollars—­”

“Good heavens!” Mrs. Salisbury said, as one stricken.

“And the worst of it is,” Alexandra pursued, with a sympathetic laugh for her mother’s concern, “that he’ll meet some Madonna-eyed little factory girl or laundry worker down there and feel that he owes it to her to—­”

“To break your heart, Sandy,” the mother supplied, all tender solicitude.

“It’s not so much a question of my heart,” Sandy answered composedly, “as it is a question of his entire life.  It’s so unnecessary and senseless!”

“And you can sit there calmly discussing it!” Mrs. Salisbury said, thoroughly out of temper with the entire scheme of things mundane.  “Upon my word, I never saw or heard anything like it!” she observed.  “I wonder that you don’t quietly tell Owen that you care for him—­ but it’s too dreadful to joke about!  I give you up!”

And she rose from her chair, and went quickly out of the room, every line in her erect little figure expressing exasperation and inflexibility.  Sandy, smiling sleepily, reopened an interrupted novel.  But she stared over the open page into space for a few moments, and finally spoke: 

“Upon my word, I don’t know that that’s at all a bad idea!” an interrupted novel.  But she stared over the open page into space for a few moments, and finally spoke: 

“Upon my word, I don’t know that that’s at all a bad idea!”

CHAPTER V

Mrs. Salisbury,” said Justine, when her mistress came into the kitchen one December morning, “I’ve had a note from Mrs. Sargent—­”

“From Mrs. Sargent?” Mrs. Salisbury repeated, astonished.  And to herself she said:  “She’s trying to get Justine away from me!”