Mr. Smith frowned, but he laughed, too.
“Poor Miss Flora! But why doesn’t she dismiss the lady?”
“She doesn’t dare to. Besides, there’s Hattie. She says Hattie is always telling her what is due her position, and that she must do this and do that. She’s being invited out, too, to the Pennocks’ and the Bensons’; and they’re worse than the maid, she declares. She says she loves to ‘run in’ and see people, and she loves to go to places and spend the day with her sewing; but that these things where you go and stand up and eat off a jiggly plate, and see everybody, and not really see anybody, are a nuisance and an abomination.”
“Well, she’s about right there,” chuckled Mr. Smith.
“Yes, I think she is,” smiled Miss Maggie; “but that isn’t telling me how to make her contented.”
“Contented! Great Scott!” snapped Mr. Smith, with an irritability that was as sudden as it was apparently causeless. “I didn’t suppose you had to tell any woman on this earth how to be contented—with a hundred thousand dollars!”
“It would seem so, wouldn’t it?”
Something in Miss Maggie’s voice sent Mr. Smith’s eyes to her face in a keen glance of interrogation.
“You mean—you’d like the chance to prove it? That you wish you had that hundred thousand?”
“Oh, I didn’t say—that,” twinkled Miss Maggie mischievously, turning away.