Mrs. Balfame, who had set the fashion, had not brought her needles to-day. She went directly to the card room; but her partner for the tournament not having arrived, she entertained her impatient friends with a recent domestic episode.

"I have a German servant, you know," she said, removing her wraps and taking her seat at the table. "A good creature and a hard worker, but leaden-footed and dull beyond belief. Still, I suppose even the dullest peasant has spite in her make-up. I have been reading tomes of books on the war, as you learned from painful experience yesterday; most of them, as it happened—a good joke on Anna that, as she gave me the list—quite antagonistic to Germany. One day when Frieda should have been dusting I caught her scowling over the chapter heads of one of them. Of course she reads English—she has been here several years. Day before yesterday, when I was knitting, she asked me whom I was knitting for, and I[Pg 40] told her—for the Belgians, of course. She asked me in a sort of growl why I didn't knit for the homeless in East Prussia—it seems that is where she comes from and she has been having letters full of horrors. I seldom bandy words with a servant, for you can't permit the slightest familiarity in this country if you want to get any work out of them. But as she scowled as if she would like to explode a shrapnel under me, and as she is the third I have had in the last five months, I said soothingly that the newspaper correspondents had neglected the eastern theatre of war, but had harrowed our feelings so about the Belgians that we felt compelled to do what we could for them. Then I asked her—I was really curious—if she had no sympathy for those thousands of afflicted women and children, merely because they were the victims of the Germans. She has a big soft face with thick lips, little eyes, and a rudimentary nose; generally as expressionless as such a face is bound to be. But when I asked her this question it suddenly seemed to turn to wood—not actively cruel; it merely expressed the negation of all human sympathy. She turned without a word and slumped—pardon the expression—out of the room. But the breakfast was burned this morning—I had to cook another for poor David—and I know she did it on purpose. I am afraid I shall have to let her go."

[Pg 40]

"I would," said Mrs. Battle, wisely. "She is probably a spy and quite clever."

"Yes, but such a worker!" Mrs. Balfame sighed reminiscently. "And when you have but one servant—"

The tardy partner bustled in and the game began.

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