“We don’t intend to have any servants; Eveline and I have settled all that.”
At this, Mr. Townsend shook his head in a most emphatic way, and said,
“That’s out of the question, child; utterly so. I will not hear to it a moment.”
“Why not? Don’t you have to attend to business all day, and are we better than you?”
“I don’t have to go into the kitchen and cook. I don’t have to go through menial household drudgery.”
“Don’t call any useful employment menial, father. Would it at all degrade me to bake you a sweet loaf of bread, or prepare you a comfortable meal when you are hungry? I think not.”
“But the hard drudgery of the thing, Eunice. You don’t know what you propose to yourselves to do.”
“Love will make the labor light,” replied Eunice, with a tone and smile that found a quick passage to the heart of her father. “Let it be as we desire.”
But Mr. Townsend would not yield the point. At least, he would not consent that a house should be taken without a room in it where a servant could sleep. So Eunice had to make another search. In a few days one was procured with the room, additional, required, at a rent of two hundred dollars per annum; and Mr. Townsend gave his consent that it should be taken, provided the mother, who had been kept ignorant of the desperate state of her husband’s business, could be brought to give a free consent to the change. The procurement of this consent was left to Eveline and Eunice. The latter, after the first doubt and fear she had experienced at her sister’s suggestion of another change in their father’s circumstances, was ready to support Eunice in every thing.
“Mother,” said Eunice, on the day after the taking of a house at a lower rent had been determined upon, “I think we might manage to live at a smaller cost than we do. Indeed, I am sure we could. Father’s business cannot be very profitable, and even the meeting of our present family expenses must be a serious matter to him.”