“I will spend less than my income,” repeated Otto, grinding his heel into the carpet. It sounds easy in a big house, but, in fact, it is easier in a small one. He retrenched, and made the whole family most increasingly uncomfortable. When, at last, he extinguished the great, wasteful fire in the hall, there was a palace revolution. The butler gave notice. “For I’m too old,” he informed Mynheer the Baron, letting him have a bit of his mind, “to expose my life at my age in them draughty passages.”
“Very well, go,” said Otto, fiercely. But he didn’t like it. The man had been with them for years. The Dowager-Baroness cried at thought of his leaving. All the servants looked sullen and demonstratively blue-nosed. For weeks the new master had been causing them successive annoyance. Some kind of chivalry taught him to screen his young wife.
“Let me do it, dear,” pleaded Ursula, when Otto complained that he must speak to the cook. “Surely that is my department.”
“Oh yes, it is,” he said, looking out of the window. “Oh yes.”
“Well, then, what has she done? She seems to me a nice, pleasant-spoken person.”
“Oh, they are all that,” cried Otto, facing round, with sudden eloquence. “They are all nice, all pleasant-spoken! My father’s people always were. Imagine, Ursula, that this woman, whom mamma has had in her service for fifteen years, daily—mind you, daily—writes down a pound of meat more than the butcher brings, and divides the profits with him!”
“How can she?” objected Ursula, who had not yet got accustomed to a household in which such things were possible, and even proper.
“How? Don’t ask me how. I suppose she calls it ‘perquisites.’ I met an English marquess once, who told me that in his father’s time the annual beer-bill had touched two thousand pounds. His was three hundred. It’s all a question of authorizing theft by silence. Keep your fingers off the tap. That’s all.” He laughed.
“I’ll weigh the meat to-morrow myself,” cried Ursula, rising already to do it. “That will stop them at once. We weigh it at home; that’s to say, Aunt Mopius often does. And I’ve had to scold Oskamp’s boy before. I should never have thought it of Oskamp. I suppose, Otto, your mother never weighs the meat?”
Otto smiled.