the boarding-house keepers have hard struggles to make their
expenditures meet their income, and they carry economy to the very verge
of meanness,--some of them fairly over the verge, I presume; and the
result is cheap food, badly cooked,--because well-cooked food means
high-priced help,--and cold rooms and dreariness and discomfort
everywhere. Now what can be done about it? Then our house is only
one of hundreds, and in many of these hundreds they employ more help
and give less wages than we; in fact, I know that some of our clerks are
looked upon with envy by a great many young men. We never have any
trouble in supplying vacancies. People swarm around us, because we have
the reputation of being liberal. We are not liberal, however; sometimes I
am inclined to think we are hardly fair, yet there is nothing I can do. I
am a junior partner, with a great deal of the responsibility, and a
third of the voting power, and I can't get salaries raised. I've been
working at that problem at intervals for a year, and have accomplished
very little. Do you wonder that I keep my eyes as closely shut as I
can?"

His wife's face wore a thoughtful, not to say perplexed look; she seemed
to have no answer ready; and, after waiting a moment for it, Mr. Roberts
bent himself again to the task of getting his business letters answered.
Before he had written one more line, her face had cleared. She
interrupted him:--

"Evan, when you talk about four hundred clerks, and multiply that by
hundreds of houses and more hundreds of clerks, I cannot follow you at
all. It is not that I am not impressed with the number,--I am,--it
appalls me; but I don't want to be appalled; I want to be helpful.
Perhaps just now there is nothing that I can do for the hundreds, so I
want to narrow my thoughts down to what, possibly, I can do. What, for