Page:Live and Let Live.djvu/78

 mind to dismiss the crew and give up the ship!" and laughing, she followed Mrs. Stedman.

"Chacun à son goût! (each one to his taste!)" said Mrs. Hartell; "mine is not in your line, dear Mrs. Hyde!" and she, too, took leave.

"Now they are gone," said Mrs. Ardley, "I must say, that if my husband was as fidgety as Sam Stedman, I would give up housekeeping too—or hang myself." Mrs. Ardley and Mrs. Hyde were old friends, and, in bygone days, schoolmates, though Mrs. Hyde was by a few years the senior; this made it easy for her to adopt the mentor style without any appearance of assumption, a fault to which there were indeed no tendencies in her character. "No, Anne," she replied, "no, you are of too happy a temper to hang yourself in any extremity, and you are too kind to drive others to hanging; so, if your husband had been as fidgety as Sam Stedman, you would have set about making his home comfortable, and not abandoned it."

"But how can a home be made what a fidgety man calls comfortable, with such servants as we have? Now, dear Mrs. Hyde, answer me that," said Mrs. Ardley, with the air of one who had uttered a poser. "By the mistress of the house doing her duty understandingly and thoroughly. We must begin at the foundation, Anne. In this country, where often, in town, we have ignorant and ill-trained domestics, and sometimes in the country none at all, it is an indispensable duty to give our daughters a thorough acquaintance with domestic affairs. It seems to me we educate them for everything else but the actual necessities of their social condition."