It would be futile and useless for me to attempt to describe the emotions of Thaddeus.  I fancy a large enough number of us having been through similar experiences to comprehend the man’s mortification and his inward wrath.  It was too great to find suitable expression at the moment.  Nothing short of the absolute destruction of the cup and the annihilation of Jane could have adequately expressed Perkins’s true feelings.  He was not by nature, however, a scene-maker—­it would have been better if he had been—­so he said nothing, abiding by his rule, which seemed to be that the man of the house would do better to reprehend the short-comings of a delinquent servant by blowing up his wife rather than by going direct to the core of the trouble and reading the maid a lecture.  A great many men adopt this same method.  I do.  It is the easiest, though it is possibly prompted by that cowardice which is latent with us all.  I never in my life have discharged more than one servant, and I not only did not do it gracefully, but discharged the wrong one; since which time I have left all that sort of work to others more competent than I. Perkins’s method was precisely thus.

“I’m not going to interfere,” was his invariable remark in cases of the kind under discussion; which was unwise, for if he had even scolded a servant as he did his wife for the servant’s fault he might have secured better service sooner or later.

Unfortunately, when Mrs. Perkins reached home that night she was so very tired with her exertions in the shops that Thaddeus hadn’t the heart to tell her what had happened, and when morning came the episode was forgotten.  When it did recur to his mind it so happened that Mrs. Perkins was out of reach.  The result was that a month had passed before Mrs. Perkins cane into possession of the facts, and it was then, of course, too late to mention it to Jane.

“You should have given her a good talking to at the time,” said Mrs. Perkins.  “It’s awful!  I don’t know what has got into Jane.  My best table-cloth has got a great hole in it, and she is very careless with the silver.  My fruit-knife last night was not clean.”

“I suppose you spoke to her about that?” said Perkins, smiling.

“Not exactly; I sent for another, and handed her the dirty one,” returned Mrs. Perkins.  “I guess she felt all that I could have said.”

And time went on, and Jane continued to decay.  She pulled corks from olive-bottles with the carving-fork prongs and bent them backwards.  She developed a habit of going out and leaving her work undone.  The powdered sugar was allowed to resolve itself into small, hard, pill-shaped lumps of various sizes.  Breakfast had a way of being served cold.  The coffee was at times merely tepid; in short, it seemed as if she really ought to be discharged; but then there was invariably some reason for postponing the fatal hour.  Either her kindness to the children