ly anxious to find something "worth doing,"
therefore had settled on this one definite duty. She had wrestled in a
determined silence with the many incompetent and degenerate negresses,
with the few impertinent Americans, with the drunken Irish and insolent
Swedes, who had filed in and out of her kitchen ever since her
marriage. Suburban life was a new thing in Endbury, and "help" could see
no advantages in it. She had strained every nerve to make them appear to
Paul, as well as to the rest of the world, the opposite of what they
were; and to do herself, furtively, when Paul was not there, those of
their tasks they refused or neglected. Every effort was concentrated, as
in her mother's and sister's households, on keeping a maid presentable
to open the door and to wait on the table, rather than to perform the
heavier parts of the daily round. Those Lydia could do herself, or she
could hire an unpresentable older scrubwoman to do them. She often
thought that if she could but employ scrubwomen all the time, the
problem would be half solved. But the achievement of each day was,
according to Endbury standards, to keep or get somebody into the kitchen
who could serve a course dinner, even if the mistress of the house was
obliged to prepare it.

She had never dreamed of feeling herself aggrieved, or even surprised,
by this curious reverse side to her outward brilliant life. All her
married friends went through the same experience. Madeleine, it is true,
announced that she was going to make Lowdor import two Japanese servants
a year, and dismiss them when they began to get American ideas; but
Madeleine was quite openly marrying Lowdor for the sake of this and
similar advantages. Lydia felt that her own problems were only the usual
lot of her kind, and though she was nearly always sick at heart over
them, she did not feel justified in complaining--least of all to Paul.

But this present trouble--this was not just a question of help. For the
last month they had been floating in the most unexpected lull of the
domestic whirlwind. The intelligence office had sent out Ellen--Ellen,
the deft-handed cook, the silent, self-effacing, competent servant of
every housekeeper's dreams. Her good luck seemed incredible. Ellen was
perfection, was middle-aged and settled, never went out in the evenings,
kept her kitchen spotlessly clean, trained the rattle-headed second
girls who came and went, to be good waitresses and made pastry that
moved