“Superfluous ornaments have no value anywhere,” said Miss Kelly. “I worked once for an interior decorator, and I learned that. A thing must not only be beautiful in itself, but in harmony with its surroundings, and serving some definite purpose. She isn’t and doesn’t, and she ought to be scrapped!”
Now not only was Miss Kelly a notably good-looking young woman, and intelligent and alert and sensible, but she was infallible. Graves knew it. He had had other disagreements with her, and had always been worsted. Still, for a time, he defied her in regard to Miss Clare.
“D’you know,” he said to me, “I hate like poison to discharge that poor girl! You see, this is her first job, and it’ll be hard for her to get another, with only a four weeks’ record here.”
“Oh, no, Graves,” said I. “Not at all! After you’ve talked to her and pointed out her faults, she—well, she’ll get rid of her faults, don’t you see? And after that—”
Then Graves declared, with a sort of magnificence:
“She hasn’t any faults, exactly. It’s lack of training that’s the trouble. If she could stay on here a little longer, she’d do as well as the others—and better. She has brains!”
“Why can’t she stay?” I asked.
“Her output’s below the average,” he said dismally. “Miss Kelly keeps charts and so on.” He scowled. “Miss Kelly’s worth her weight in gold, and all that,” he said, “but she’s pig-headed. I’ve tried to explain to her that it’s actually more efficient to keep and train an employee, even if you have to shift him to another department, than to break in a new one. I’ve shown her in black and white what the actual cost of this eternal hiring and firing is; but no! She jumps down my throat with a lot of her own figures about what this Miss Clare costs the department every day. Hair-splitting, that’s all it is!”
Graves should have been warned, each time he opened his mouth, that what he said would be used against him. Of course this was. Each time he dealt the death blow, we reminded him of the cost of this eternal hiring and firing, and how much more efficient it was, and so on.
Miss Clare was shifted out of Miss Kelly’s department into another, which had a human man, young Allen, at its head; but he, too, rebelled.