“Yes!  How much do you pay?” insisted half a dozen.

“W-why, I pay six a week,” she feebly confessed.

They gasped.  Juanita protested, “Don’t you think it’s hard on the rest of us when you pay so much?” Juanita’s demand was reinforced by the universal glower.

Carol was angry.  “I don’t care!  A maid has one of the hardest jobs on earth.  She works from ten to eighteen hours a day.  She has to wash slimy dishes and dirty clothes.  She tends the children and runs to the door with wet chapped hands and——­”

Mrs. Dave Dyer broke into Carol’s peroration with a furious, “That’s all very well, but believe me, I do those things myself when I’m without a maid—­and that’s a good share of the time for a person that isn’t willing to yield and pay exorbitant wages!”

Carol was retorting, “But a maid does it for strangers, and all she gets out of it is the pay——­”

Their eyes were hostile.  Four of them were talking at once.  Vida Sherwin’s dictatorial voice cut through, took control of the revolution: 

“Tut, tut, tut, tut!  What angry passions—­and what an idiotic discussion!  All of you getting too serious.  Stop it!  Carol Kennicott, you’re probably right, but you’re too much ahead of the times.  Juanita, quit looking so belligerent.  What is this, a card party or a hen fight?  Carol, you stop admiring yourself as the Joan of Arc of the hired girls, or I’ll spank you.  You come over here and talk libraries with Ethel Villets.  Boooooo!  If there’s any more pecking, I’ll take charge of the hen roost myself!”

They all laughed artificially, and Carol obediently “talked libraries.”

A small-town bungalow, the wives of a village doctor and a village dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over paying a servant a dollar more a week.  Yet this insignificance echoed cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas denouncing a million Carols, with a hundred thousand Vida Sherwins trying to shoo away the storm.

Carol felt guilty.  She devoted herself to admiring the spinsterish Miss Villets—­and immediately committed another offense against the laws of decency.

“We haven’t seen you at the library yet,” Miss Villets reproved.

“I’ve wanted to run in so much but I’ve been getting settled and——­I’ll probably come in so often you’ll get tired of me!  I hear you have such a nice library.”

“There are many who like it.  We have two thousand more books than Wakamin.”

“Isn’t that fine.  I’m sure you are largely responsible.  I’ve had some experience, in St. Paul.”

“So I have been informed.  Not that I entirely approve of library methods in these large cities.  So careless, letting tramps and all sorts of dirty persons practically sleep in the reading-rooms.”