“I don’t think I understand,” said Bessie.

“Well, we’ll put it this way:  There are thirty days in a month.  That means ninety meals a month.  If she cooks sixty-seven and a half of them she can stay; if she fails to cook the other twenty-two and a half she can stay; but woe be unto her if she slips up by even so little as a millionth part of the sixty-eighth!”

“I don’t see how you can manage the half part of it.”

“We’ll leave that to her,” said Thaddeus, firmly; “and, what is more, we’ll put John and Mary on the same basis, and Dennis we won’t have on any basis at all.  A man who will take advantage of his brother’s absence at a wake to black the shoes of that brother’s only employer with stove-polish is not the kind of a man I want to have around.”

“It will be a very good plan,” said Bessie, “for all except Mary.  Her absences she cannot well avoid.  She has to go to church.”

“How many times a week does she have to go?” queried Thaddeus.

“She is required to go to confession.”

“Well, let her reform, and then she’ll have nothing to go to confession for.  I don’t believe that’s where she goes, either.  I notice that one-half those evenings she takes off, permitting me to mind the front door, and enabling us both to acquire proficiency in the art of helping ourselves at dinner, there’s a fireman’s ball or a policeman’s hop or a letter-carriers’ theatre party going on somewhere in the county, and it’s my belief the worshipping she does on these occasions is at the shrine of Terpsichore or that of Melpomene, which is a heathen custom and not to be tolerated here.  If she’s so fond of living in church we can quote to her Hamlet’s advice to Ophelia—­’Get thee to a nunnery!’ Why, Bess, I was mortified to death the other night when Bradley dined here, he’s all the time bragging about his menagerie, and I tried to bluff him out and make him believe we were waited on by angels in disguise, and you know what happened.  He came, saw, and I was regularly knocked out.  You let us in; we waited on ourselves; cook had prepared the seven-o’clock dinner at five to give her a chance to go to the hospital to see her brother-in-law with the measles; John had one of his Central-African fires on, and Bradley’s laughing about it yet.”

“Mr. Bradley was very disagreeable the other night, anyhow,” sniffed Bessie.  “He acted as if he were camping out!”

“Well, I can’t honestly say I blame him for that,” retorted Thaddeus.  “It only needed a balsam bed and a hole in the roof to let the rain in on him to complete the illusion.”