At Home with the dines | Page 4

unquestioning
confidence that the battle would be won by her genius. If it were lost,
then it would be my turn to interfere and criticize and show how affairs
should have been managed.

But men, as a rule, have no such intuition, and I wondered about the
Angel. How little I knew him!
I was arranging the flowers for the table when the Angel came home.
When he had gone back to dress, Mary came up to me and in a
confidential way said:
"Missis, dear, don't tell your father about the electric light till after
dinner,--excuse me for putting in my two cents, but I always was
nosey!"
"Tell my father?" I repeated. My father was in Washington.
"Boss! Mr. Jardine!" explained Mary.
"Why did you call him my father? Surely you must know--"
"Pardon me, dear child. I always call him your father when I'm talking
to myself, because nobody but your father could be as careful of you as
that dear man!"
I sat down to laugh.
"You don't believe much in husbands, then?" I said.
"Saving your presence, that I don't. I believe in fathers, and so I always
call that blessed man your father. Will you believe it, Missis, he
wouldn't let me reach up to take the globes off to clean them, nor lift
the five-gallon water-bottle when it came in full from the grocer. He
treats my white hairs as if they were his mother's--God love him!"
I listened to Mary with a dubious mind, divided between admiration of
the Angel and the intention of telling him not to help her too much, for
fear, after the manner of her kind, she should discover a delicacy of
constitution which would prevent her from lifting the water-bottle even
when it was empty.
"And I'll tell you what I've been doing on the quiet for him to show him
that I'm not ungrateful. You know his white waistcoats have been done

up at the laundry so scandalous that I'd not have the face to be taking
your money if I were that laundryman, so I've just done them myself,
and would you take a look at them before I carry one back for him to
put on?"
I took a look, and they were of that faultless order of work that makes
you think the millennium has come.
I took one back to where the Angel stood before the mirror wrestling in
a speaking silence with his tie. I had not been married long, but I had
already learned that there are some moments in a man's life which are
not for speech. He smiled at me in the glass to let me know that he
recognized my presence, and would attend to me later.
When the tie was made, I drew a long breath.
"The country is saved once more!" I sighed.
He laughed. I mean he smiled. Not once a month does he laugh, and
always then at something which I don't think in the least funny.
As he took the waistcoat from my hand his face lighted up.
"Now that is something like!" he said. "I tell you it pays to complain
once in awhile. I wrote that laundry a scorcher about these waistcoats."
"It does pay," I said. Then I explained.
"Do you know what I think?" he said. "I think we've got a regular old
cast-iron angel in Mary."
"Oh, rap on wood," I cried, frantically reaching out with both hands.
"Do you want her to spill soup down your neck tonight?"
"I didn't think," he said, apologetically, groping for wood. "Now, do I
dare speak?"
"Yes, go on. What do you think of her?"

"I think she is thoroughly competent to deal with the emergencies of a
New York apartment-house. This morning just before I went out I
heard her holding a heart-to-heart talk with the grocer. It seems that the
eggs come in boxes done up in pink cotton and laid by patent hens that
stamp their owner's name on each egg. For the privilege of eating these
delicacies we pay the Paris price for eggs. Now it would also seem that
these hens guarantee at that price to lay and deliver to the purchaser an
unbroken, uncracked, wholly perfect egg in the first flush of its youth.
But to-day the careless hens had delivered two cracked eggs out of one
unhappy dozen to Mary. With a directness of address seldom met with
in good society, Mary thus delivered herself down the dumb-waiter,
'Well, damn you for a groceryman--'"
"Oh, Aubrey! Did she say that word?"
"She said just that. 'When we are paying a dollar a look at eggs, what
do you mean by sending me two cracked ones out of twelve? To be
sure somebody has been sitting on