“Where did you get her?” asked Thaddeus. “At an Imbecility Office?”
“I don’t quite know what you mean—an Imbecility Office?”
“Only my pet, private, and particular name for it, my dear. You would speak of it as an Intelligence Office, no doubt,” was the reply. “My observation of the fruit of Intelligence Offices has convinced me that they deal in Imbecility.”
“Not quite,” laughed Mrs. Perkins. “They look after Domestic Vacancies.”
“Well, they do it with a vengeance,” said Perkins. “We’ve had more vacancies in this house to do our cooking and our laundering and our house-work generally than two able-bodied men could shake sticks at. It seems to me that the domestic servant of to-day is fonder of preoccupation than of occupation.”
“Jane, I think, is different from the general run,” said Mrs. Perkins. “As I said, she has no nonsense about her.”
“Is she—an—an ornament to the scene—pretty, and all that?” asked Perkins.
“Quite the reverse,” replied the little house-keeper. “She is as plain as a—as a—”
“Say hedge-fence and be done with it,” said Perkins. “I’m glad of it. What’s the use of providing a good dinner for your friends if they are going to spend all their time looking at the waitress? When I give a dinner it makes me tired to have the men afterwards speak of the waitress rather than of the purée or the birds. If any domestic is to dominate the repast at all it should be the cook.”
“Service counts for a great deal, though, Ted,” suggested Mrs. Perkins.