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 tepartee, her ready efforts to please everybody with her service, no matter how gay or how glum, raised up certain champions for her, who were not silent in her defense. Louise would much rather have had them keep their peace.

Goosie was friendly, but cynical and impatient, after the way of people who know much about some common thing, and hold all the rest of the world ignorant and in contempt. Try as she might, Louise could not march up to the swinging door between kitchen and dining-room with a loaded tray on her palm, held at shoulder's level, back up to it and give it a kick with anything approaching the art of Goosie.

Louise had to take the door slowly, pushing it with her free shoulder and edging through; Goosie marched out while it was on the swing from her competent and practiced foot. Louise was afraid to risk more than half as high a stack of empties on the tray as Goosie bore in triumph to the kitchen sink, where Angus Valorous washed them in the midst of a clatter from which he drew no knowing what simulation of jangling freight trains and puffing engines.

There was no romance, and mighty little dignity, in the labor of carrying on food at the Cottonwood Hotel; perhaps there is not much romance nor dignity in such a job anywhere. Louise did not doubt that Goosie's complaint of the unequal distribution of work, due to her assistant's want of bone and muscle, and inability to master the art of kicking open a swinging door, had led to Mrs. Cowgill's suggestion about the court house