“I’ll send him a letter to-day!”
“Wouldn’t it be simpler just to send her away?”
The priest thought to himself that this was by no means the simplest way, seeing it would mean further expense for a new housekeeper. Moreover, Jomfru van Loos was very useful; without her, there would be no sort of order anywhere. He remembered how things had been managed at first, when his wife looked after the house herself—he was not likely to forget it.
“Whom will you get in her place?” he asked.
“I would rather do her work myself,” she answered.
At that he laughed bitterly, and said, “A nice mess you will make of it.”
But his wife was hurt and offended at this. “I can’t see,” she said, “but that I must look after the house in any case. So the work a housekeeper did would not make much difference.”
The priest was silent. It was no use discussing it further, no earthly use—no. “We can’t send her away,” he said. But there was his wife with her shoes all sorely cracked and worn, pitiful to see. And he said as he went out, “We must manage to get you a new pair of shoes, and that soon.”
“Oh, it’s summer now,” she answered.