LITMIR.BIZ

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you are always talking as if I don't know how to manage servants. All I know is that you are always changing, and I keep mine years and years."

      "That's because you let them have their own way," said her sister. "You can keep servants if you don't follow them up, and insist on it that they shall do their duty. Let them run all over you and live like mistresses, and you can keep them. For my part, I like to change – new brooms always sweep clean."

      "Well, it's a different thing, Maria – you with your small family, and mine with so many. I'd rather bear anything than change."

      "Oh, well, yes; I suppose there's no help for it, Nellie. Of course I wasn't blaming you, so don't fire up about it. I know you can't make yourself over," said Aunt Maria. This was the tone with which she usually settled discussions with those who differed from her on modes and measures. After all, they could not be like her, so where was the use of talking?

      Aunt Maria also had the advantage in all such encounters of a confessed reputation as an excellent manager. Her house was always elegant, always in order. She herself was gifted with a head for details that never failed to keep in mind the smallest item, and a wiry, compact constitution that never knew fatigue. She held the keys of everything in her house, and always turned every key at the right moment. She knew the precise weight, quantity, and quality of everything she had in possession, where it was and what it might be used for; and, as she said, could go to anything in her house without a candle in the darkest night. If her servants did not love, they feared her, and had such a sense of her ever vigilant inspection that they never even tried to evade her. For the least shadow of disobedience she was ready to send them away at a moment's warning, and then go to the intelligence office and enter her name for another, and come home, put on apron and gloves, and manfully and thoroughly sustain the department till they came.

      Mrs. Wouvermans, therefore, was celebrated and lauded by all her acquaintances as a perfect housekeeper, and this added sanction and terror to her pronunciamentos when she walked the rounds as a police inspector in the houses of her relations.

      It is rather amusing to a general looker-on in this odd world of ours to contrast the serene, cheerful good faith with which these constitutionally active individuals go about criticising, and suggesting, and directing right and left, with the dismay and confusion of mind they leave behind them wherever they operate.

      They are often what the world calls well-meaning people, animated by a most benevolent spirit, and have no more intention of giving offense than a nettle has of stinging. A large, vigorous, well-growing nettle has no consciousness of the stings it leaves in the delicate hands that have been in contact with it; it has simply acted out its innocent and respectable nature as a nettle. But a nettle armed with the power of locomotion on an ambulatory tour, is something the results of which may be fearful to contemplate.

      So, after the departure of Aunt Maria our little housekeeper, Eva, was left in a state of considerable nervousness and anxiety, feeling that she had been weighed in the balance of perfection and found wofully wanting. She was conscious, to begin with, that her characteristic virtues as a housekeeper, if she had any, were not entirely in the style of her good relative. She was not by nature statistical, nor given to accounts and figures. She was not sharp and keen in bargains; she was, she felt in her inmost, trembling soul, a poor little mollusk, without a bit of a shell, hiding in a cowardly way under a rock and ready at any time to be eaten up by big fishes. She had felt so happy in her unlimited trust in Mary, who knew more than she did about housekeeping – but she had been convicted by her aunt's cross-questions of having resigned the very signet ring and scepter of her house into her hands. Did she let Mary go all over the house? Did she put away the washing? Did Eva allow her to open her drawers? Didn't she count her towels and sheets every week, and also her tea-spoons, and keep every drawer and cupboard locked? She ought to. To all these inquiries Eva had no satisfactory response, and began to doubt within herself whether she had begun aright. With sensitive, conscientious people there is always a residuum of self-distrust after discussions of the nature we have indicated, however vigorously and skillfully they may have defended their courses at the time.

      Eva went over and over in her own mind her self-justifications – she told herself that she and her aunt were essentially different people, incapable of understanding each other sympathetically or acting in each other's ways, and that the well-meant, positive dicta of her relative were to be let go for what they were worth, and no more.

      Still she looked eagerly and anxiously for the return of her husband, that she might reinforce herself by talking it over with him. Hers was a nature so transparent that, before he had been five minutes in the house, he felt that something had gone wrong; but, the dinner-bell ringing, he retired at once to make his toilet, and did not open the subject till they were fairly seated at table.

      "Well, come now, Puss – out with it! Why that anxious brow? What domestic catastrophe? Anything gone wrong with the ivies?"

      "Oh, no; the ivies are all right, growing beautifully – it isn't that – "

      "Well, then, what is it? It seems there is something."

      "Oh, nothing, Harry; only Aunt Maria has been spending the day here."

      Eva said this with such a perplexed and woful face that Harry leaned back in his chair and laughed.

      "What a blessing it is to have relations," he said; "but I thought, Eva, that you had made up your mind not to care for anything Aunt Maria says?"

      "Well, she has been all over the house, surveying and reviewing as if she owned us, and she has lectured Mary and got her into hysterics, and talked to me till I am almost bewildered – wondering at everything we mean to do, and wanting us to take her ways and not ours."

      "My dearest child, why need you care? Take it as a rain-storm, when you've been caught out without your umbrella. That's all. Or why can't you simply and firmly tell her that she must not go over your house or direct your servants?"

      "Well, you see, that would never do. She would feel so injured and abused. I've only just made up and brought things to going smoothly, and got her pacified about our marriage. There would be another fuss if I should talk that way. Aunt Maria always considered me her girl, and maintains that she is a sort of special guardian to me, and I think it very disagreeable to quarrel with your relations, and get on unpleasant terms with them."

      "Well, I shall speak to her, Eva, pretty decidedly, if you don't."

      "Oh, don't, don't, Harry! She'd never forgive you. No. Let me manage her. I have been managing her all day to keep the peace, to keep her satisfied and pleased; to let her advise me to her heart's content, about things where I can take advice. Aunt Maria is a capital judge of linens and cottons, and all sorts of household stuffs, and can tell to a certainty just how much of a thing you'd want, and the price you ought to pay, and the exact place to get it; and I have been contriving to get her opinion on a dozen points where I mean to take it; and I think she has left, on the whole, highly satisfied with her visit, though in the main I didn't give in to her a bit about our plans."

      "Then why so tragic and tired-looking?"

      "Oh, well, after all, when Aunt Maria talks, she says a great many things that have such a degree of sense in them that it worries me. Now, there's a good deal of sense in what she said about trusting too much to servants, and being too indulgent. I know mamma's girls used to get spoiled so that they would be perfect tyrants. And yet I cannot for the life of me like Aunt Maria's hard, ungracious way of living with servants, as if they were machines."

      "Ah, well, Eva, it's always so. Hard, worldly people always have a good deal of what looks like practical sense on their side, and kindness and unselfishness certainly have their weak points; there's no doubt of that. The Sermon on the Mount is open to a great deal of good hard worldly criticism, and so is every attempt to live up to it practically; but, never mind. We all know that the generous way is the strong way, and the best way, in the long run."

      "And then you know, Harry, I haven't the least talent for being hard and sharp," said Eva, "and so I may as well take the advantages of my sort of nature."

      "Certainly you may; people never succeed out of their own line."

      "Then there's another trouble.

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