Sir Isaac broke out into confirmatory matter. There was an idea in his head that this talk might open his wife’s eyes to some sense of the magnitude of his commercial life, to the wonder of its scale and quality. He compared notes with Charterson upon a speeding-up system for delivery vans invented by an American specialist and it made Blenker flush with admiration and turn as if for sympathy to Lady Harman to realize how a modification in a tailboard might mean a yearly saving in wages of many thousand pounds. “The sort of thing they don’t understand,” he said. And then Sir Isaac told of some of his own little devices. He had recently taken to having the returns of percentage increase and decrease from his various districts printed on postcards and circulated monthly among the district managers, postcards endorsed with such stimulating comments in red type as “Well done Cardiff!” or “What ails Portsmouth?”—the results had been amazingly good; “neck and neck work,” he said, “everywhere”—and thence they passed to the question of confidential reports and surprise inspectors. Thereby they came to the rights and wrongs of the waitress strike.
And then it was that Lady Harman began to take a share in the conversation.
She interjected a question. “Yes,” she said suddenly and her interruption was so unexpected that all three men turned their eyes to her. “But how much do the girls get a week?”
“I thought,” she said to some confused explanations by Blenker and Charterson, “that gratuities were forbidden.”
Blenker further explained that most of the girls of the class Sir Isaac was careful to employ lived at home. Their income was “supplementary.”
“But what happens to the others who don’t live at home, Mr. Blenker?” she asked.
“Very small minority,” said Mr. Blenker reassuring himself about his glasses.
“But what do they do?”
Charterson couldn’t imagine whether she was going on in this way out of sheer ignorance or not.
“Sometimes their fines make big unexpected holes in their week’s pay,” she said.