“I won’t ask you to clean anything,” said Luella desperately. “If you’ll just stay until tomorrow. I can’t possibly get anybody else tonight.”
Mrs. Danski smiled politely.
“I got my own children to think of, just like you.” It was on Luella’s tongue to offer her more money, but suddenly her temper gave way.
“I’ve never heard of anything so selfish in my life!” she broke out. “To leave me at a time like this! You’re an old fool!”
“If you’d pay me for my time, I’d go,” said Mrs. Danski calmly.
“I won’t pay you a cent unless you’ll stay!”
She was immediately sorry she had said this, but she was too proud to withdraw the threat.
“You will so pay me!”
“You go out that door!”
“I’ll go when I get my money,” asserted Mrs. Danski indignantly. “I got my children to think of.”
Luella drew in her breath sharply, and took a step forward. Intimidated by her intensity, Mrs. Danski turned and flounced, muttering, out of the door.
Luella went to the phone and, calling up the agency, explained that the woman had left.
“Can you send me someone right away? My husband is sick and the baby’s sick—”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hemple; there’s no one in the office now. It’s after four o’clock.”
Luella argued for a while. Finally she obtained a promise that they would telephone to an emergency woman they knew. That was the best they could do until tomorrow.
She called several other agencies, but the servant industry had apparently ceased to function for the day. After giving Charles his medicine, she tiptoed softly into the nursery.
“How’s baby?” she asked abstractedly.
“Ninety-nine one,” whispered the nurse, holding the thermometer to the light. “I just took it.”
“Is that much?” asked Luella, frowning.
“It’s just three-fifths of a degree. That isn’t so much for the afternoon. They often run up a little with a cold.”
Luella went over to the cot and laid her hand on her son’s flushed cheek, thinking, in the midst of her anxiety, how much he resembled the incredible cherub of the “Lux” advertisement in the bus.
She turned to the nurse.
“Do you know how to cook?”
“Why—I’m not a good cook.”
“Well, can you do the baby’s food tonight? That old fool has left, and I can’t get anyone, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Oh, yes, I can do the baby’s food.”
“That’s all right, then. I’ll try to fix something for Mr. Hemple. Please have your door open so you can hear the bell when the doctor comes. And let me know.”
So many doctors! There had scarcely been an hour all day when there wasn’t a doctor in the house. The specialist and their family physician every morning, then the baby doctor—and this afternoon there had been Doctor Moon, placid, persistent, unwelcome, in the parlor. Luella went into the kitchen. She could cook bacon and eggs for herself—she had often done that after the theatre. But the vegetables for Charles were a different matter—they must be left to boil or stew or something, and the stove had so many doors and ovens that she couldn’t decide which to use. She chose a blue pan that looked new, sliced carrots into it, and covered them with a little water. As she put it on the stove and tried to remember what to do next, the phone rang. It was the agency.
“Yes, this is Mrs. Hemple speaking.”
“Why, the woman we sent to you has returned here with the claim that you refused to pay her for her time.”
“I explained to you that she refused to stay,” said Luella hotly. “She didn’t keep her agreement, and I didn’t feel I was under any obligation—”
“We have to see that our people are paid,” the agency informed her; “otherwise we wouldn’t be helping them at all, would we? I’m sorry, Mrs. Hemple, but we won’t be able to furnish you with anyone else until this little matter is arranged.”
“Oh, I’ll pay, I’ll pay!” she cried.
“Of course we like to keep on good terms with our clients—”
“Yes—yes!”
“So if you’ll send her money around tomorrow? It’s seventy-five cents an hour.”
“But how about tonight?” she exclaimed. “I’ve got to have some one tonight.”
“Why—it’s pretty late now. I was just going home myself.”
“But I’m Mrs. Charles Hemple! Don’t you understand? I’m perfectly good for what I say I’ll do. I’m the wife of Charles Hemple, of 14 Broadway—”
Simultaneously she realized that Charles Hemple of 14 Broadway was a helpless invalid—he was neither a reference nor a refuge any more. In despair at the sudden callousness of the world, she hung up the receiver.
After another ten minutes of frantic muddling in the kitchen, she went to the baby’s nurse, whom she disliked, and confessed that she was unable to cook her husband’s dinner. The nurse announced that she had a splitting headache, and that with a sick child her hands were full already, but she consented, without enthusiasm, to show Luella what to do.
Swallowing her humiliation, Luella obeyed orders while the nurse experimented, grumbling, with the unfamiliar stove. Dinner was started after a fashion. Then it was time for the nurse to bathe Chuck, and Luella sat down alone at the kitchen table, and listened to the bubbling perfume that escaped from the pans.
“And women do this every day,” she thought. “Thousands of women. Cook and take care of sick people—and go out to work too.”
But she didn’t think of those women as being like her, except in the superficial aspect of having two feet and two hands. She said it as she might have said “South Sea Islanders wear nose-rings.” She was merely slumming today in her own home, and she wasn’t enjoying it. For her, it was merely a ridiculous exception.
Suddenly she became aware of slow approaching steps in the dining-room and then in the butler’s pantry. Half afraid that it was Doctor Moon coming
