dinner, enough milk for a nourishing soup, eggs and salad for
luncheon--what about potatoes?

Lizzie deliberately frustrated this house-wifely ambition. She
flounced and muttered when other hands than her own were laid upon
her icebox. She turned on rushing faucets, rattled dishes in her
pan. Yet Mrs. Salisbury felt that she must personally superintend
these matters, because Lizzie was so wasteful. The girl had not been
three months in the Salisbury family before all bills for supplies
soared alarmingly.

This was all wrong. Mrs. Salisbury fretted over it a few weeks, then
confided her concern to her husband. But Kane Salisbury would not
listen to the details. He scowled at the introduction of the topic,
glanced restlessly at his paper, murmured that Lizzie might be
"fired"; and, when Mrs. Salisbury had resolutely bottled up her
seething discontent inside of herself, she sometimes heard him
murmuring, "Bad--bad--management" as he sat chewing his pipe-stem on
the dark porch or beside the fire.

Alexandra, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the house, was equally
incurious and unreasonable about domestic details.

"But, honestly, Mother, you know you're afraid of Lizzie, and she
knows it," Alexandra would declare gaily; "I can't tell you how I'd
manage her, because she's not my servant, but I know I would do
something!"

Beauty and intelligence gave Alexandra, even at eighteen, a certain
serene poise and self-reliance that lifted her above the old-