"How provoking you are, Archie!" exclaimed Letitia impatiently. "Isn't any Vanderbilt good enough for us--to get a cook from? Suppose it were Alfred, or Reginald, or William K. Vanderbilt. What difference does it make? I was so overjoyed that I felt positively pleased to hear that Mrs. Vanderbilt was with the Duchess of Marlborough. If she had been here I should have deemed it my duty to call upon her for a reference, and--you know what these people are--it might have been a bad one. Absolutely, I'd sooner have a bad Vanderbilt cook, than a good ordinary, plain affair." "There is something in what you say, old girl," I was bound to assent. "If _you_ think so, dear, I am quite satisfied," Letitia responded readily. "But there is one thing about Mrs. Potzenheimer--by-the-by, she suggests that we call her Nellie--that troubles me. She says she never wants to go out." "And that troubles you!" I exclaimed, astonished. "I should think you would be rejoiced. We shall feel so much safer in the knowledge that Mrs. Potzen--Nellie--is always in the kitchen." "But it is so sad, Archie," persisted Letitia. "When I asked her what night she would like to go out, she burst out crying. She said she had nowhere to go--that she was old, and that nobody cared for her. She wept for ten minutes, and I think--I'm not sure, Archie--that I joined her. Poor old soul! My first impulse was to ask her to come in and sit with us--" "Letitia!" "I said 'my first impulse,'" she went on firmly. "I never act on first impulses, and I did not do so this time. Just the same, I felt sorry for cook. Perhaps she will get chummy with the servants in other apartments. She seems so respectable and dresses neatly in black. A more striking contrast to Anna Carter could scarcely be imagined. She is extremely quiet, and sits down a good deal. Each time I have seen her she has been 'resting her bones' as she calls it. Isn't it pitiful, Archie, to think of such a woman being forced to earn her living, instead of passing her days in a little cottage with honeysuckle all over it--" "But there are none in New York, dear." "You needn't be so disgustingly literal, Archie," Letitia protested with a pout. "I say that it is a pity she can't pass her days in a little cottage with honeysuckle all over it, and with her grandchildren grouped around her knee." "Is she so fearfully old?" I asked in alarm. "One needn't be disgracefully antique to have grandchildren," my wife declared. "You are so old-fashioned, dear. You revel in pictures of white-haired, toothless, old creatures when you hear of grandmothers. If my grandmother were alive to-day she would be just fifty-three. She married at sixteen." "They always do, nowadays," I retorted cynically. "Sixteen seems to be the age for women to marry at when they intend to become grandmothers."