"Yes, instead of a maid. You'll pardon the suggestion but I was thinking that Mr. Boyce-Upchurch being a foreigner and accustomed, of course, to butlers, and a butler giving a sort of air--a tone, as it were--to a household, that perhaps--well--" They had fallen on fertile ground, those seeds. They were sprouting, germinating. Before the massive shoulders of the Ingleglade Woman's Club's efficient recording secretary had vanished down the bowery and winding reaches of Edgecliff Avenue they were putting forth small green speculative shoots through Mrs. Gridley's mind. Always and ever, from the very first days of her married life, Mrs. Gridley had cherished in the back of her mind a picture of an establishment in which the butler, a figure of dignity and poise and gray striped trousers in the daytime but full-dress by night, would be the chief of staff. As what woman has not? And now for the gratifying of that secret ambition she had an excuse and a reason. * * * * * Section Two of this narrative brings us to another conversation. At this stage the narrative seems somehow to fall naturally into sections, but one has a premonition that toward the last it will become a thing of cutbacks and close-ups and iris-ins and fade-outs, like a movie. It brings us to this other conversation, which passed over the telephone between Mrs. Gridley and her brother Mr. Oliver Braid. "Well, Dumplings," said that gentleman, speaking at noon of Tuesday from his office, "the hellish deed is done!" "You got one then?" she answered eagerly. "Got one? Madam, you wrong me and you low-rate him. I got the One and only One--the Original One. The only misleading thing about him is his name. Be prepared for a pleasant shock. It's Launcelot Ditto. I ask you to let that soak into your tissues and be absorbed by the system. Only Ditto means more of the same and if I'm any judge, there aren't any more at home like him and there never will be. But the Launcelot part fits like a union suit. "Oh, girl, I'm telling you he's got everything, including the adenoids. Not the puny domestic brand of our own faulty and deficient land, mind you, but the large, super-extra-fine export, golden-russet adenoid of that favored island whose boast is that Britons never shall be slaves except to catarrh. And he's as solemn as a Masonic funeral. And he stepped right out of a book by way of the stage. He ought to be serving strawberries and Devonshire cream on the terrace to the curate of St. Ives and the dear old Dowager Duchess of What-you-may-call-'em, while the haw-haw blooms in the hedgerow. He ought to be coming on at the beginning of Act One to answer the telephone and pat the sofa pillows smooth and fold up 'The Pink 'Un,' and sigh deeply because the Young Marster is going to the dogs. He ought to be outlining the plot to a housekeeper in rustling black silk named Meadows." "Ollie Braid, are you delirious?"