Mamma, little person, meant by Heaven to be pretty if she had not in the stead to be so perturbed, just here seemed disposed and almost unreasonably, to harbor feeling against Aunt Viney for wanting what was coming to her. There had been similar feeling on her part toward the iceman, and, preceding him, toward the butcher.
"If it were anybody but Viney herself, coming upstairs to me right in my own room and asking for her money, I would feel I could not overlook it," she was saying. "She should have known that as soon as it was convenient for her to have it, I would give it to her."
"It is the second time the collector of dues on her funeral insurance has come around," reminded Auntie, "and I dare say he made her feel she had to ask for it."
"There's more to it than her merely coming upstairs to me about it," said Mamma. "Two dollars and a half to three dollars is all anyone thought of paying a servant in my day." Her tone would imply that her day and her authority were decades past and other people in this matter of Aunt Viney, altogether and unworthily responsible. "Four dollars to a servant is out of all reason."
And so indeed four dollars at that day and in that place would have been but for the agreement fixing the wages of this old person at this sum!
Selina's cheeks flamed red. "Aunt Viney is getting four dollars instead of three, Mamma," she reminded her mother, "because you dismissed the washwoman who was getting two dollars, and persuaded Aunt Viney to undertake it for the extra one." Cooking, washing, ironing, dining-room, front door, coal, kindling, fires and something of the rest of it, were the part of Aunt Viney!
Honesty drove Selina to defend her--tentatively and timidly, since not for worlds in her day would a daughter venture to hurt a parent's tender feelings. "Four dollars isn't so terribly much more than a pittance, is it, Mamma? For a week's work? That is," hastily and apologetically, "if one were the receiver of it?"
Time was to be, and that time soon, when Selina would know more about the place of four dollars in the scale of recompense.
Auntie at this point moved heavily and uneasily. One always felt that nature meant Auntie for something more definite. Her ponderous energy was inexhaustible. To see her expend it on irrelevant and inconsequential things, was to gather that after some fashion of reasoning all her own, she drew comfort from such activities even to convincing herself such efforts were contributory to the general relief.