"There's no telling what she's going to do," Mrs. Baxter went on, with a gentle sigh. "I do hope she'll marry him! People are still talking about her strange behavior in leaving us to go to work. How I did try to persuade her not to do it! I knew it would involve us in a scandal. And the idea of her offering to go to work in your office!" Mr. Baxter continued to look abstractedly into the grate, as he had looked ever since she had begun her half-reminiscent strain. Now that she was ended, she could but note that his mind was elsewhere. "James!" "Yes." He turned to her with a start. "Why, you have not spoken a word to me. Is there something on your mind?" He studied the flames for a moment. "I learned this afternoon that the Iron Workers' Union will probably demand a ten per cent. increase in wages." "What! And that means a strike?" "It doubtless does, unless we grant their demand." "But can you afford to?" "We could without actually running at a loss." Mrs. Baxter was on the board of patronesses of one or two workingwomen's clubs and was a contributor to several fashionable charities, so considered herself genuinely thoughtful of the interests of wage-earners. "If you won't lose anything, I suppose you might as well increase their salaries. Most of them can use a little more money. They're respectable people who appreciate everything we do for them. And you can make it up by charging higher prices." Mr. Baxter sat silent for a space looking at his wife, quizzically, admiringly. He was inclined to scoff in his heart at his wife's philanthropic hobbies, but he indulged her in them as he did in all her efforts to attain fashionable standing. He had said, lover fashion, in their courtship days, that she should never have an ungratified wish, and after a score of years he still held warmly to this promise. He still admired her; and little wonder, for sitting with her feet stretched toward the open fire, her blonde head gracefully in one hand, her brown eyes fixed waitingly on him, looking at least eight less than her forty-three years, she was absolutely beautiful. "Elizabeth," he said at length, "do you know how much we spent last year?" "No." "About ninety-three thousand dollars." "So much as that? But really, it isn't such a big sum. A mere nothing to what some of our friends spend." "This year, with our Newport house, it'll be a good thirty thousand more; one hundred and twenty-five thousand, anyway. Now I can't make the owners pay the raise, as you seem to think." He smiled slightly at her business naïveté. "The estimates on the work I'll do this year were all made on the present scale, and I can't raise the estimates. If the ten per cent. increase is granted, it'll have to come out of our income. Our income will be cut down for this year to at least seventy-five thousand. If things go bad, to fifty thousand." Mrs. Baxter rose excitedly to her feet. "Why, that's absurd!"