“Doesn’t it!” sighed Mrs. Grafton; “I find, all the time, that it takes much more than I possess. When it comes to the problems of how to let down Cecilia’s tucks without showing, how to vary the steak-chops diet that we grow so tired of, and how to decrease the gas-bills, I feel my mental inferiority. I’m glad that you have come home with new ideas; we need them, dear.” A voice rose from the foot of the stairs below,—a shrill soprano voice, that skipped the scale from C to C, and back again to A. “That’s Ellen,” said Mrs. Grafton, laying down her sewing with a sigh. “I can’t teach her to come to me when she wants me. She says that she doesn’t mind messages if she can ‘holler ’em,’ but she ‘won’t climb stairs fer Mrs. Roosevelt herself.’ I suppose I’ll have to go down.” “What does she want?” “That’s what makes it interesting: you never know. Perhaps an ironing-sheet, or the key to the fruit-closet. Maybe the plumber has come, or the milkman is to be paid, or the telephone is ringing. Or possibly a book-agent has made his appearance. She always keeps it a mystery until I get down.” “I don’t see how on earth you live in that way. I never could get anything done.” “I don’t accomplish much,” sighed her mother. “The days ought to be three times as long, to hold all the things they bring to be done. My life is like the mother’s bag in the ‘Swiss Family Robinson.’” “I can’t work that way,” said Barbara. “It’s ruinous to any continuity of thought. I suppose that means that I’ll have to shut myself up in my room to write.” Mrs. Grafton had gone downstairs. “I don’t see how mother can stand it,” said the girl to herself. “Two telephone calls, an interview with the butcher, a stop to tie up David’s finger, a hunt for father’s lost letter, some money to be sent down to the vegetable man, and two calls to the front door,—that makes eight interruptions in the last hour. If she would only systematize things, so she wouldn’t be disturbed, she wouldn’t look so tired as she does. There ought not to be so much work in this house.” She glanced around the big, homey-looking living-room, through the door into the narrow, old-fashioned hall, and beyond, into the sunny dining-room. The house was an old one; the furnishing, though comfortable, showed the signs of hard usage and disorder. An umbrella reposed on the couch, Jack’s football mask lay on the table, and her mother’s ravelings littered the floor. A heterogeneous collection of battered animals occupied the window-sill, and a pile of the doctor’s memoranda was thrust under the clock. “I don’t wonder that things stray away here,” she added, “with no one to pick them up but mother. She ought to insist upon orderliness from each member of the family, and save herself. I’m afraid that her over-work is partly her own fault.”