“Don’t talk so cynically, Daddy dear,” Mrs. Salisbury said, smiling over her fancy work, as one only half listening.

“I tell you, a change is coming in all these things, Sally,” said the cynic, unruffled.

“You bet there is!” his daughter seconded him from the favorite low seat that permitted her to rest her mouse-colored head against his knee.

“Your mother’s a conservative, Sandy,” pursued the man of the house, encouraged, “but there’s going to be some domestic revolutionizing in the next few years.  It’s hard enough to get a maid now; pretty soon it’ll be impossible.  Then you women will have to sit down and work the thing out, and ask yourselves why young American girls won’t come into your homes, and eat the best food in the land, and get well paid for what they do.  You’ll have to reduce the work of an American home to a system, that’s all, and what you want done that isn’t provided for in that system you’ll have to do yourselves.  There’s something in the way you treat a girl now, or in what you expect her to do, that’s all wrong!”

“It isn’t a question of too much work,” Mrs. Salisbury said.  “They are much better off when they’re worked hard.  And I notice that your bookkeepers are kept pretty busy, Kane,” she added neatly.

“For an eight-hour day, Sally.  But you expect a twelve or fourteen-hour day from your housemaid—­”

“If I pay a maid thirty-seven and a half dollars a month,” his wife averred, with precision, “I expect her to do something for that thirty-seven dollars and a half!”

“Well, but, Mother, she does!” Alexandra contributed eagerly.  “In Justine’s case she does an awful lot!  She plans, and saves, and thinks about things.  Sometimes she sits writing menus and crossing things out for an hour at a time.”

“And then Justine’s a pioneer; in a way she’s an experiment,” the man said.  “Experiments are always expensive.  That’s why the club is interested, I suppose.  But in a few years probably the woods will be full of graduate servants—­everyone’ll have one!  They’ll have their clubs and their plans together, and that will solve some of the social side of the old trouble.  They—­”

“Still, I notice that Mrs. Sargent herself doesn’t employ graduate servants!” Mrs. Salisbury, who had been following a wandering line of thought, threw in darkly.

“Because they haven’t any graduates for homes like hers, Mother,” Alexandra supplied.  “She keeps eight or nine housemaids.  The college is only to supply the average home, don’t you see?  Where only one or two are kept—­that’s their idea.”

“And do they suppose that the average American woman is willing to go right on paying thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents for a maid?” Mrs. Salisbury asked mildly.

“For five in family, Mother!  Justine would only be thirty if three dear little strangers hadn’t come to brighten your home,” Sandy reminded her.  “Besides,” she went on, “Justine was telling me only a day or two ago of their latest scheme—­they are arranging so that a girl can manage two houses in the same neighborhood.  She gets breakfast for the Joneses, say; leaves at nine for market; orders for both families; goes to the Smiths and serves their hearty meal at noon; goes back to the Joneses at five, and serves dinner.”