"But the waiting oh the table. Who will do that?"
"Half a dollar a week extra to the chambermaid will secure that service from her."
"But she has enough to do besides waiting on the table," objected Mrs. Darlington.
"Miriam and I will help more through the house than we have yet done. Three dollars a week and the waiter's board will be saving a good deal."
Mrs. Darlington sighed heavily, and then said—
"To think what I have borne from that Scragg and his family, ignorant, low-bred, vulgar people, with whom we have no social affinity whatever, who occupy a level far below us, and who yet put on airs and treat us as if we were only their servants! I could bear his insolence no longer. Ah, to what mortifications are we not subjected in our present position! How little dreamed I of all this, when I decided to open a boarding-house! But, Edith, to come back to what we were conversing about, it would be something to save the expense of our waiter; but what are three or four dollars a week, when we are going behind hand at the rate of twenty?"
"If Mrs. Marion"—
Edith checked herself, and did not say what was in her mind. Mrs. Darlington was silent, sighed again heavily, and then said—
"Yes; if it wasn't for the expense of keeping Mrs. Marion. And she has no claim upon us."
"None but the claim of humanity," said Edith.