“I’m going to call Miss Phipps,” he declared.  Primmie, the tears still pouring down her cheeks, seized him by the arm.

“Don’t you do it!” she commanded.  “Don’t you dast to do it!  I’ll—­ I’ll stop cryin’.  I—­I’m goin’ to if you’ll only wait and give me a chance.  There!  There!  See, I’m—­I’m stoppin’ now.”

And, with one tremendous sniff and a violent rub of her hand across her nose, stop she did.  But she was still the complete picture of misery.

“Why, what is the matter?” demanded Galusha.

Primmie sniffed once more, gulped, and then blurted forth the explanation.

“She—­she’s canned me,” she said.

Galusha looked at her uncomprehendingly.  Primmie’s equipment of Cape Cod slang and idiom, rather full and complete of itself, had of late been amplified and complicated by a growing acquaintance with the new driver of the grocery cart, a young man of the world who had spent two hectic years in Brockton, where, for a portion of the time, he worked in a shoe factory.  But Galusha Bangs, not being a man of the world, was not up in slang; he did not understand.

“What?” he asked.

“I say she’s canned me.  Miss Martha has, I mean.  Oh, ain’t it awful!”

“Canned you?  Really, I—­”

“Yes, yes, yes!  Canned me, fired me.  Oh, don’t stand there owlin’ at me like that!  Can’t you see, I—­ Oh, please, Mr. Bangs, excuse me for talkin’ so.  I—­I didn’t mean to be sassy.  I’m just kind of loony, I guess.  Please excuse me, Mr. Bangs.”

“Yes, yes, Primmie, of course—­of course.  Don’t cry, that’s all.  But what is this?  Do I understand you to say that Miss Phipps has—­ah—­discharged you?”

“Um-hm.  That’s what she’s done.  I’m canned.  And I don’t know where to go and—­and I don’t want to go anywheres else.  I want to stay here along of her.”

She burst into tears again.  It was some time before Galusha could calm her sufficiently to get the story of what had happened.  When told, flavored with the usual amount of Primmieisms, it amounted to this:  Martha had helped her with the supper dishes and then, instead of going into the sitting room, had asked her to sit down as she had something particular to say to her.  Primmie obediently sat and her mistress did likewise.

“But she didn’t begin to say it right off,” said Primmie.  “She started four or five times afore she really got a-goin’.  She said that what she’d got to say was dreadful unpleasant and was just as hard for her to say as ’twould be for me to hear.  And she said I could be sartin’ sure she’d never say it if ’twan’t absolutely necessary and that she hadn’t made up her mind to say it until she’d laid awake night after night tryin’ to think of some other way out, but that, try as she could, she didn’t see no other way.  And so then—­so then she said it.  Oh, my savin’ soul!  I declare I never thought—­”