At Home with the dines | Page 3

I heard a great noise in the kitchen as of
moving chairs on a bare floor and Mary's voice raised in fluent
denunciation. I flew to the scene and saw a strange man standing on the
table with his hands on the electric light metre over the door, while
Mary had one hand on his left ankle, and the other on his coat-tails. Her
very spectacles were bristling with anger.
"Come down out of that, young feller!" she was crying, jerking both
coat-tails and ankle of the unhappy man.
"Leggo my leg!" he retorted.
"I'll pull your leg for you," cried Mary, "old woman that I am, more
than any of your young jades, if you don't drop that metre. Come down,
I say!"
"What is the trouble, Mary?" I asked.
"Missis! The impidence of that brat! He's come to shut off the electric
light without a word of warning, and you going to have company this

blessed night for dinner."
"Here are my orders," said the man, sullenly. "I'd show them to you if
you'd leggo my coat-tails," he added, furiously.
"I'll pull them off before I let go," said Mary, grimly. "A pretty way for
the New York Electric Light Company to do business I say! If you
want a five-dollar deposit from the Missis why didn't you write and
give notice like a Christian? Do you suppose we are thieves? Are we
going to loot the house of the electric bulbs, and go and live in
splendour on the guilty sales of them?"
"Let me cut it off according to orders, and I'll go to the office and
explain, and come back and turn it on for you!" pleaded the man.
But Mary's grasp on leg and coat was firm.
"Not on yer life," she said, derisively. "You'll come back this day week
or next month at your own good pleasure, and Mr. Jardine will be
doing the explaining and the running to the office. Make up your mind
that the thing is going to be settled my way, or you'll stay here till you
do. I'm in no hurry."
"Make her leggo of me," he said to me.
Mary gave me a look, and I obediently turned my back. The man
slammed the little door of the metre, and Mary let go of him. He
climbed down.
"I can turn it off in the basement just as well," he said, with a grin.
I was about to interfere and offer a cheque, but Mary was too quick for
me. She took him by the arm, with a "Come, Missis," and marched him
before her, with me meekly following, to the telephone in the Angel's
study.
"Now, then, young feller, call up the office!" she commanded. The man
obeyed. Indeed few would have dared to resist.

"Now get away and let the Missis talk to your boss. Tell him what we
think of such doings, Missis."
I, too, obeyed her. I stated the case in firm language. He apologized, he
grovelled. It was all a mistake (Mary sniffed); the man had no such
orders (Mary snorted). I could send a cheque at my leisure, and if I
would permit him to speak to his henchman all would be well.
I handed the receiver to a very cowed and surly man, whom Mary
persistently addressed as "Major." As he turned from the telephone,
Mary surveyed him with twinkling eyes.
"Are you going to turn off our electric light, Major?" she said, laughing
at him. To my surprise, he laughed with her. Tradespeople always did.
"Not to-day," he said as amiably as though she had been entertaining
him at tea. Then she let him out, and went back to her dusting. She
looked at me compassionately.
"It's the way that dummed company takes to get people to pay their
deposits promptly," she said. "But trust Mary Jane Few Clothes to get
ahead of a little trick like that! My, Missis, isn't it hot!"
I went back to my letter-writing feeling somewhat pensive. It was clear
that we had a competent person in the kitchen, and as for myself it
would not disturb me in the least if she managed me, provided she dealt
as peremptorily with the housework as she handled any other difficult
proposition. But with the Angel? I was not very well acquainted with
my husband myself, and I was slightly exercised as to whether he
would bow his neck to Mary's yoke as meekly as I intended to do or not.
I seemed to feel intuitively that Mary was a great and gallant general in
the domestic field, and my mother's thirty years' war with incompetent
servants made me yearn to close my lips as hermetically as an army
officer's and blindly obey my general's orders with an