o; the janitor's colored, to begin with, and, more than that, he
isn't the type one meets. But, if he qualified otherwise, I wouldn't
mind meeting him just because he happened to be the janitor. Now, young
Forrest turns up at the club for golf, and Sandy and I picked Fred Hall
up the other day, coming back from the river." Kane Salisbury, leaning
back in his chair, watched the rings of smoke that rose from his cigar.
"It's a funny thing about you women," he said lazily. "You keep
wondering why smart girls won't go into housework, and yet, if you get
a girl who isn't a mere stupid machine, you resent every sign she gives
of being an intelligent human being. No two of you keep house alike,
and you jump on the girl the instant she hangs a dish towel up the way
you don't. It's you women who make life so hard for each other. Now, if
any decent man saw a young fellow at the bottom of the ladder, who was
as good and clever and industrious as Justine is, he'd be glad to give
him a hand up. But no; that means she's above her work, and has to be
snubbed."

"Don't talk so cynically, Daddy dear," Mrs. Salisbury said, smiling
over her fancy work, as one only half listening.

"I tell you, a change is coming in all these things, Sally," said the
cynic, unruffled.

"You bet there is!" his daughter seconded him from the favorite low
seat that permitted her to rest her mouse-colored head against his knee.

"Your mother's a conservative, Sandy," pursued the man of the house,
encouraged, "but there's going to be some domestic revolutionizing in
the next few years. It's hard enough to get a maid now; pretty soon
it'll be impossible. Then you women will have to sit down and work the
thing out, and ask yourselves why young American girls won't come into
your homes, and eat the best food in the land, and get well paid for
what they do. You'll have to reduce the work of an American home to a
system, that's all, and what you want done that isn't provided for in
that system you'll have to do yourselves. There's something in the way
you treat a girl now, or in what you expect her to do, that's all
wrong!"

"It isn't a question of too much work," Mrs. Salisbury said. "They are
much better off when they're worked hard. And I notice that your
bookkeepers are kept pretty busy, Kane," she added neatly.

"For an eight-hour day, Sally. But you expect a twelve or fourteen-hour
day from your housemaid--"

"If I pay a maid thirty-seven and a half do