"It is too bad!" cried the girl, indignantly; "that Viny doesn't earn her salt! I wonder how you can have patience with her, mother, if I were her mistress I'd have sent her off at a moment's warning long before this."
"Let us try to imitate God's patience with us, which is infinite;" Mrs. Keith answered low and reverently; "let us bear with her a little longer. But indeed, I do not know that we could fill her place with any one who would be more competent or satisfactory in any way."
"I'm afraid that is quite true; but it does seem too hard that such a woman as my gifted, intellectual, accomplished mother should have to spend her life in the drudgery of housework, cooking, mending and taking care of babies."
"No, dear; you are taking a wrong view of it. God appoints our lot; he chooses all our changes for us; Jesus, the God-man, dignified manual labor by making it his own employment during a great part of his life on earth; and 'it is enough for the disciple that he be as his Master, and the servant as his Lord.'
"Besides, what sweeter work can a mother have than the care and training of her own offspring?"
"But then the cooking, mother, and all the rest of it!"
"Well, dear, the health, and consequently the happiness and usefulness of my husband and children, depend very largely upon the proper preparation of their food; so that is no mean task."
"Ah, mother, you are determined to make out a good case and not to believe yourself hardly used," said Mildred, smiling, yet speaking in a half petulant tone.
"No, I am not hardly used; my life is crowned with mercies, of the very least of which I am utterly unworthy," her mother answered, gently.