"
"Ah!" said Mrs. Brinley.
"Exactly," said Brinley. "That was a point I had not considered at all.
After all, she was right. What can you expect for sixteen dollars?"
"Well, what next?" asked Mrs. Brinley, her eyes a-twinkle.
"I asked her if she thought she could do better on twenty dollars," he
answered. "She thought she could, and that's the way it stands now."
"I see," said Mrs. Brinley, and then she burst into a perfect explosion
of laughter, which she soon curbed, however, as she noticed the
expression on poor Brinley's face. "I've no doubt you have acted with
perfect justice in this matter, my dear George," she said. "But I think
hereafter I'll do my own discharging. Your way is rather
extravagant--er--don't you really think so?"
"Perhaps," said Brinley, and departed for town.
"The madam is right about that," he said to himself later in the day, as
he thought over the incident. "But extravagant or not, I couldn't have
discharged that woman if somebody had offered me a clear hundred. Mrs.
B. doesn't know it, but I was in a blue funk from start to finish."
In which surmise Brinley was wrong. Mrs. B. did know it, and when two
weeks later Ellen became absolutely impossible, and demanded a
kitchen-maid as the perquisite of a twenty-dollar cook, Mrs. Brinley
didn't think of calling upon her husband to perform the function of the
executioner, but like a brave woman actually summoned the cook into her
presence and did it herself.
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