She was not pleased, and spoke with excessive coldness when she asked if Donna Clementina was at home.  The porter stood motionless beside the cab, leaning on his broom.  After a pause he said in a rather strange voice that Donna Clementina was certainly in, but that he could not tell whether she were awake or not.

“Please find out,” answered the Baroness, with impatience.  “I am waiting,” she added with an indescribable accent of annoyance and surprise, as if she had never been kept waiting before, in all the fifty years of her more or less fashionable life.

There were speaking-tubes in the porter’s lodge, communicating with each floor of the great Conti palace, but the porter did not move.

“I cannot go upstairs and leave the door,” he said.

“You can speak to the servant through the tube, I suppose!”

The porter slowly shook his massive head, and his long grey beard wagged from side to side.

“There are no servants upstairs,” he said.  “There is only the family.”

“No servants?  Are you crazy?”

“Oh, no!” answered the man meditatively.  “I do not think I am mad.  The servants all went away last night after dinner, with their belongings.  There were only sixteen left, men and women, for I counted them.”

“Do you mean to say—­” The Baroness stopped in the middle of her question, staring in amazement.

The porter now nodded, as solemnly as he had before shaken his head.

“Yes.  This is the end of the house of Conti.”

Then he looked at her as if he wished to be questioned, for he knew that she was not really a great lady, and guessed that in spite of her magnificent superiority and coldness she was not above talking to a servant about her friends.

“But they must have somebody,” she said.  “They must eat, I suppose!  Somebody must cook for them.  They cannot starve!”

“Who knows?  Who knows?  Perhaps they will starve.”

The porter evidently took a gloomy view of the case.

“But why did the servants go away in a body?” asked the Baroness, descending from her social perch by the inviting ladder of curiosity.

“They never were paid.  None of us ever got our wages.  For some time the family has paid nobody.  The day before yesterday, the telephone company sent a man to take away the instrument.  Then the electric light was cut off.  When that happens, it is all over.”

The man had heard of the phenomenon from a colleague.

“And there is nobody?  They have nobody at all?”

The Baroness had always been rich, and was really trying to guess what would happen to people who had no servants.

“There is my wife,” said the porter.  “But she is old,” he added apologetically, “and the palace is big.  Can she sweep out three hundred rooms, cook for two families of masters and dress the Princess’s hair?  She cannot do it.”