“Ah, you live in the grand style—in blank verse, I may say,” Flo went on carelessly. “But that was never my way. Perhaps, after all, each gets what each most cares for. I should not have married Jem, perhaps, if I had been of the blank verse style. But here we are, wandering off into the fields of romance. The business in hand is, let Pollie go. Engage your washerwoman—you say you have one once a month—to come to you every day till you are suited. Then you’ll get at the bottom of all Pollie’s little ways, and will find out what kitchen things you have really got, and what is gone past recovery, down the sink or up the chimney. You can make out new lists, and then the minute you see a suitable girl, there’s the place ready for her, and so she starts fair.” Lucy resented all Mrs. Brand’s doubts of Pollie. She could not see why a single act of inconsideration and rashness should so condemn character, root and branch, in a servant, when the same would be easily condoned in a friend or relative, and possibly even regarded as rather pretty and romantic; simply another illustration of “all for love and the world well lost.” She knew young men and women, too, who had treated their own parents quite as thoughtlessly as Pollie had treated her master’s household. Lucy had always regarded such conduct with great severity, whereas Flo had only laughed over it, retailing “delicious” incidents of how the “old folks” had been “sold.” This was but another instance of higher standards of conduct being set for the kitchen than for the drawing-room. It had always seemed to Lucy’s chivalrous nature to be a gross injustice that, from those members of society who are presumed, conventionally, to have had the fewest “advantages,” more should be expected than from those who are said to have had “every advantage.” She could not understand it, not yet having learned that this injustice, like all injustice, is rooted in sheer selfishness. Many people care nothing at all for “rights and wrongs” save as these affect their own personal convenience. Many more are seldom brought even to consider “rights and wrongs” until these reach the same point. Alas, our household state would be actually worse than it is, were not our servants in a general way, at least, more punctual and more “tidy” than many of ourselves! Notwithstanding Lucy’s instinctive abhorrence of so many of her sister’s domestic standpoints, she yet accepted Mrs. Brand’s advice as to letting Pollie go and having a charwoman interregnum. Indeed, as no other alternative offered, she was forced to accept it. Pollie went off, tearful and subdued, and full of humbly-expressed hopes “that the master would come back quite strong.”