We stood there like dummies, listening to the tirade. What could we do? To be sure, there were two of us, and we were in our own house. The antagonist, however, was a servant, not in her own house. The situation, for reasons that it is impossible to define, was hers. She knew it, too. We allowed her full sway, because we couldn't help it. The sympathy of the public, in case of violent measures, would not have been on our side. The poor domestic, oppressed and enslaved, would have appealed to any jury of married men, living luxuriously in cheap boarding-houses! When she left us, as she did when she was completely ready to do so, Letitia began to cry. The sight of her tears unnerved me, and I checked a most unfeeling remark that I intended to make to the effect that, "if the wind be favorable, we shall be at Gothenburg in forty hours." "It's not that I mind her insolence," she sobbed, "we were going to send her off anyway, weren't we? But it's so humiliating to be 'done.' We've been 'done.' Here have I been working hard at Swedish--writing exercises, learning verbs, studying proverbs--just to talk to a woman who speaks English as well as I do. It's--it's--so--so--mor--mortifying." "Never mind, dear," I said, drying her eyes for her; "the Swedish will come in handy some day." "No," she declared vehemently, "don't say that you'll take me to Sweden. I wouldn't go to the hateful country. It's a hideous language, anyway, isn't it, Archie? It is a nasty, laconic, ugly tongue. You heard me say _Tig_ to her just now. _Tig_ means 'be silent.' Could anything sound more repulsive? _Tig! Tig! Ugh!_" Letitia stamped her foot. She was exceeding wroth. "Aunt Julia, and her clean slate!" she went on. "If this was a sample of a clean slate, give me one that has been scribbled all over. The annoying thing is that we have to stand still and listen to all this abuse. These women seem to hate one so! They are always on the defensive, when there is nothing to defend. They won't let you treat them nicely. Honestly, Archie, I think that they are all anarchists and that they hate us because we have a few dollars more than they have." It was rather a grave assertion but I was not prepared to combat it. Could it be the fault of our "system"--admitting, for the sake of argument, that we have a system? Why did peasants, from the purlieus of foreign countries, undergo a "sea change" the instant they landed? Why did ladies who would have clamored to black your shoes in their own country, insist that you should black theirs when they came to yours? Why was it? What did it mean? Surely it was a problem, as knotty as that of the cooking of eggs _à la reine_. Still, undoubtedly, there are chefs who have succeeded in elaborating the eggs _à la reine_. Were there any people in this broad land, who, by dint of a life's persistence, had managed to understand their cook?