When the lady becomes a servant... and the servant a lady!!

Within the four walls of the house a war rages: it is not hot — the heat of pitched battle having become old-fashioned; nor cold — we have grown so used to that style that we no longer pay it any mind; nor atomic — for we know that kind lies outside the range of application and use. Impossible, then! For the war of the house is all three combined: its axis is the servant, and its victims are the people of the house. No sooner does the axis flare up as it turns, or give the slightest sign from which one may scent that its accustomed heat has sunk into a sudden coldness, than ruin and desolation descend upon the family, and life in general is saddled with all the makings of defeat and dissolution.

But my lady the woman has lately bestirred herself to face this grinding war — or rather has been forced to face it at the prompting of her maid, who never flagged in scolding her mistress every day with that embarrassing question: "Won't you get us a washing machine, a dough-beating machine, a machine for sweeping and wiping, for drying and ironing and wringing?"...

So our lady goes down to scour the markets and review the arms depots: for woman has been a warrior ever since Zenobia and Semiramis and Dido — and why should she imagine herself unfit to enter the fray, when she has that gilded skin bestowed upon her by the scorching sea breezes and the caress of the azure shore's waves all this summer long? Certain, too, that the hand of invention has shaken her hand with every useful novelty — whose benefit shall spread and multiply — from the land of the liberation of slaves?!

Fate signed the order for the first duel of its kind when a decree issued from the pampered servant — without prior notice or warning — that she felt an overpowering longing for the olive harvest, all the more since the season would be followed by the wedding of her cousin to one of her kinsmen! In the face of this decree it was no longer my lady's to consent or not consent to being the first to reach her bolted house in the city, and to enlist a jet-propelled machine to secure the evacuation of the massed armies of dust — until such time as the servant should descend with all speed, that very day, and furnish her with her ample reinforcements. And until that day, may my lady's hours be happy ones!

As for the lady, she rose to meet the danger encircling her kingdom, and took her servant's desertion of her in her most trying circumstances — even if it was put on — as a challenge to prove the truth of the claim, and a touchstone to test her fitness for independence. Her experience of the axis had, over all this time, furnished her with a kind of wariness whose substance was passive defense, and a kind of deluded pretense that she could do without her, whose substance was propaganda to stiffen the fighter's arm. And she, true to her word, makes ready her equipment and prepares to declare the struggle by training the weapon on wall and board — and would that she could train the solution of kerosene and potash on the machinery of the axis itself, instead of on the dirt and dust and grime! God confound her for a base sycophant!

For the design my lady follows in the operation of cleaning is minute in its details and teeming with observations. And the hardest thing of all for her to bear, in this case, is that she will be directing those details and observations at no one but herself — playing killer and killed at once. Killed she surely is, even before she opens combat. And there is no escape for her except to surrender her plan, drawn up years ago, down to its last particular — but by