Mrs. Brinley gazed at him silently in open-mouthed wonder for a full half-minute.

“You did what?” asked Mrs. Brinley.

“I told her we’d give her twenty dollars a month instead of sixteen,” said Brinley.  “You needn’t laugh,” he added.  “I began very severely.  Asked her what she meant by ignoring our wishes as to hours.  I dilated forcefully upon her apparent fondness for burning steaks to a crisp, and sending broiled chicken to the table looking as if somebody had dropped a flat-iron on them.”

“Good!” exclaimed Mrs. Brinley.  “And what did she say?  Was she impertinent?”

“Not a bit of it,” said Brinley “She took it very nicely until I spoke of the muffins, after which I had intended to give her notice to quit, but she took the wind completely out of my sails by asking me what I expected at sixteen dollars a month.”

“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.  A less courageous woman would have gone downstairs into the kitchen to do it.

WILKINS

It was a rather remarkable affair, taken altogether.  Wilkins was not what one would call an attractive man, and none of the young women of Dumfries Corners who had met him had ever manifested anything but a pronounced aversion to his society.

“I’d rather be a wall-flower than dance with Sam Wilkins,” one of these young women had said.  “He not only can’t dance, but, what is infinitely worse, he doesn’t know that he can’t dance, and as for his conversation—­well, give me silence.”