“Oh, do not speak of that!  The thought makes me sick.  Our handsome French china dinner set, which cost us a hundred and fifty dollars, is completely ruined.  Half of the plates are broken, and there is scarcely a piece of it not injured or defaced.  My heart aches to see the destruction going on around us.”

“I was in Mr. Scragg’s room to-day,” said Edith.

“Well, what of it?” asked her mother.

“It would make you sick in earnest to look in there.  You know the beautiful bowl and pitcher that were in her chamber?”

“Yes.”

“Both handle and spout are off of the pitcher.”

“Edith!”

“And the bowl is cracked from the rim to the centre.  Then the elegant rosewood washstand is completely ruined.  Two knobs are off of the dressing-bureau, the veneering stripped from the edge of one of the drawers, and the whole surface marked over in a thousand lines.  It looks as if the children had amused themselves by the hour in scratching it with pins.  Three chairs are broken.  And the new carpet we put on the floor looks as if it had been used for ten years.  Moreover, every thing is in a most filthy condition.  It is shocking.”

Mrs. Darlington fairly groaned at this intelligence.

“But where is it all to lead, Edith?” she asked, arousing herself from a kind of stupor into which her mind had fallen.  “We cannot go on as we are now going.”

“We must reduce our expenses, if possible.”

“But how are we to reduce them?  We cannot send away the cook.”

“No.  Of course not.”

“Nor our chambermaid.”

“No.  But cannot we dispense with the waiter?”

“Who will attend the table, go to market, and do the dozen other things now required of him?”

“We can get our marketing sent home.”

“But the waiting oh the table.  Who will do that?”

“Half a dollar a week extra to the chambermaid will secure that service from her.”

“But she has enough to do besides waiting on the table,” objected Mrs. Darlington.

“Miriam and I will help more through the house than we have yet done.  Three dollars a week and the waiter’s board will be saving a good deal.”

Mrs. Darlington sighed heavily, and then said—­

“To think what I have borne from that Scragg and his family, ignorant, low-bred, vulgar people, with whom we have no social affinity whatever, who occupy a level far below us, and who yet put on airs and treat us as if we were only their servants!  I could bear his insolence no longer.  Ah, to what mortifications are we not subjected in our present position!  How little dreamed I of all this, when I decided to open a boarding-house!  But, Edith, to come back to what we were conversing about, it would be something to save the expense of our waiter; but what are three or four dollars a week, when we are going behind hand at the rate of twenty?”