"No cook since Monday, Selina, and neither nurse for the baby or house-boy to-day. When one of them gets mad, the others always take it up and follow. What we're coming to I'm sure I can't say. The older servants such as my mother's been used to dealing with, are dying off, and the younger ones don't know how to do a thing and won't let you show them."
It was a familiar plaint, and Selina was so accustomed to it, it slid nowadays from the consciousness as housekeepers voiced it, like a too-oft repeated platitude. Cousin Anna had such trouble continually; Mrs. Williams, while Selina taught there, never seemed to have her full quota of servants at any one time and never ceased to say so, and the Addisons and even the Carters were complainers, too. Selina took Mrs. Caldwell's grievance as a matter of course.
"I've been coming over for a good long visit with Judy ever since I got home," she replied, "but if you're busy, you'll need her, and won't want me, Mrs. Caldwell?"
"Juliette? I'm glad you've come hunting her. I'm sure I don't know what we're going to do with her, Selina. She's never been stubborn or ugly in her life before. It's been going on now for sometime, this undercurrent of resentment to her father, and I don't mind speaking out with you, Selina, we look on you quite as one of ourselves, it's come to a break, an open rupture between them. Her father can't see it anyway but that she's been underhand in her defiance, and she won't allow that she cares in the least what he thinks. Of course, I don't know how much she may have told you. Go on up to her room. The little girls are at school, and I'm thankful the baby's asleep. Juliette and I've just finished in the kitchen and she's upstairs starting to straighten the bedrooms."
Selina went through the halls to the front stairway. She didn't fancy the Caldwells' house. Everything was over-elaborate and nothing very well cared for and there seemed a regrettable mixture. She couldn't bear the bisque cupid, for instance, which hung from the costly gilt chandelier. And she and Adele and Maud deplored the portrait of Juliette at three which hung over the mantelpiece. Cunning Judy as she really had been, here forever seated on a rose-bank, her curls in tiers, her cheeks carmine, and a sash of blue bound round her tummy so precisely that her embroidered skirts flew out beneath as though released. And Selina disliked the showy pattern in the velvet carpet on the halls and up the stairs. But she did love Juliette.
She went up the steps. She knew something of the trouble between Juliette and her father, and could guess what had brought about the present rupture. About the time she went South, Juliette had dared be audacious in a way that caused her friends to hold breath, terrified at thought of what the storm would be when discovery by her father came.
Having reached the hallway above, Selina tapped on a door which was ajar at the head of the stairs, the door to Juliette's own room. At the sound, Juliette, in an apron like the one upon her mother, turned, and seeing Selina in the doorway, sat down suddenly on an ottoman at hand and resting her black-tressed little head against the edge of the bureau she was dusting, went into passionate weeping. It was as if the sight of her friend loosed the pent-up flood of her unhappiness.
Quickly enough words equally as passionate made their way through the wild sobbing. "It's the stupidity of Papa's position, his utter lack of reason, that's so maddening, Selina. 'I'll see a daughter of mine going to college!' is the whole of it. And his unfairness, too, stops any attempted answering on my part after he's had his say, with 'That'll do now. I don't care to hear any more on the subject.' And what's his argument, I'd like to know, Selina? He hasn't any. Simply none. Just the senseless, stubborn stand he's got from somewhere. 'I'll see a daughter of mine going to college. Get busy and help your mother with the younger children and the house, and don't let's hear any further nonsense on the subject.'"
Selina sat down aghast. Yielding by disposition herself, and product of a lifelong submission to a loving if sometimes paralyzing authority against which she had lifted a tentative protest only once or twice, she gazed at Juliette dismayed. At pretty Judy, facing her from the ottoman, she herself now on a nearby chair, their young knees almost a-touch, a miniature, flashing, apparently altogether volatile creature, suggestive of the ruby-throated hummingbirds that darted about Auntie's flowers and vines in the backyard in summer!
This little Juliette had been raised under a certain amount of authority, too, but the authority of a young and complacent father who overindulged his family so long as his own mood was genial, but who when his temper was ruffled, as Maud put it, like the heathen raged. Still a parent and father is parent and father. The foundation tenet to all known ethics in the family relation as Selina was familiar with them, that of unquestioning obedience to the man of the household, was being repudiated, and this by seemingly crushable little Juliette.