Carolyn Wells 
The Curved Blades 
crime classic

I, for one, shouldn’t be sorry to go. She is getting too impossible!” “She is!” put in Anita; “every day she pounds us worse! I’d like to kill her!” The fierce words and would-be menacing glance of the little blonde beauty were about as convincing as a kitten declaring himself a war lord, and even the stately Pauline smiled at the picture. “She ought to be killed, ” declared Haviland, “and I say this dispassionately. I wouldn’t do it, because killing is not in my line, but the eternal fitness of things requires her removal to another sphere of usefulness. She makes life a burden to three perfectly good people, and some several servants …