Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) by Various
page 78 of 259 (30%)
changed.

"I understood you all the time," continued Miss Lyberg insultingly. "I
listened to you. I knew what you thought of me. Now I'm telling you what
I think of you. The idea of turning out my lady-friends, on a Thursday
night, too! And me a-slaving for them, and a-bathing for them, and
a-treating them to ice cream and cake, and in me own kitchen. You ain't
no lady. As for you"--I seemed to be her particular pet--"when I sees a
man around the house all the time, a-molly-coddling and a-fussing, I
says to myself, he ain't much good if he can't trust the women folk
alone."

We stood there like dummies, listening to the tirade. What could we do?
To be sure, there were two of us, and we were in our own house. The
antagonist, however, was a servant, not in her own house. The situation,
for reasons that it is impossible to define, was hers. She knew it, too.
We allowed her full sway, because we couldn't help it. The sympathy of
the public, in case of violent measures, would not have been on our
side. The poor domestic, oppressed and enslaved, would have appealed to
any jury of married men, living luxuriously in cheap boarding-houses!

When she left us, as she did when she was completely ready to do so,
Letitia began to cry. The sight of her tears unnerved me, and I checked
a most unfeeling remark that I intended to make to the effect that, "if
the wind be favorable, we shall be at Gothenburg in forty hours."

"It's not that I mind her insolence," she sobbed, "we were going to send
her off anyway, weren't we? But it's so humiliating to be 'done.' We've
been 'done.' Here have I been working hard at Swedish--writing exercises,
learning verbs, studying proverbs--just to talk to a woman who speaks
DigitalOcean Referral Badge