estimate our several shares in it; so Francesca and I say good night
and leave her toiling like Cicero in his retirement at Tusculum. By
midnight she has generally brought the account to a point where a
half-hour's fresh attention in the early morning will finish it.
Not that she makes it come out right to a penny. She has been
treasurer of the Boston Band of Benevolence, of the Saturday Morning
Sloyd Circle, of the Club for the Reception of Russian Refugees, and
of the Society for the Brooding of Buddhism; but none of these
organisations carries on its existence by means of pounds,
shillings, and pence, or Salemina's resignation would have been
requested long ago. However, we are not disposed to be captious; we
are too glad to get rid of the bill. If our united thirds make four
or five shillings in excess, we divide them equally; if it comes the
other way about, we make it up in the same manner; always meeting
the sneers of masculine critics with Dr. Holmes's remark that a
faculty for numbers is a sort of detached-lever arrangement that can
be put into a mighty poor watch.



Chapter II. The powdered footman smiles.



Salemina is so English! I can't think how she manages. She had not
been an hour on British soil before she asked a servant to fetch in
some coals and mend the fire; she followed this Anglicism by a
request for a grilled chop, 'a grilled, chump chop, waiter, please,'
and so on from triumph to triumph. She now discourses of methylated
spirits as if she had never in her life heard of alcohol, and all