Throughout the story, Saki demonstrates how Louisa Mebbin is determined to earn and save as much money as possible. In the following passage—which takes place on the night of the hunt—the narrator uses a hyperbole to capture Louisa’s sense of financial scarcity:
“I suppose we are in some danger?” said Miss Mebbin.
She was not actually nervous about the wild beast, but she had a morbid dread of performing an atom more service than she had been paid for.
Here, the narrator captures Louisa’s hyperbolic commitment to not “performing an atom more service than she had been paid for.” It is, of course, impossible to measure the “atoms” involved in labor, but Saki’s language here makes it clear that Louisa refuses to be exploited in any way. That she worries more about her finances in this moment than about surviving the potential tiger attack demonstrates how deep her worries go.
This moment is notable because, unlike female characters in other early-20th-century literature, Louisa does not worry about money because she wants to provide for her family. As readers come to learn later in the story, her primary interest is in owning her own weekend cottage house. In this sense, Louisa challenges certain feminine norms at the time (by wanting money for herself) and also reproduces middle- and upper-class norms of seeking comfort at the expense of others (as she ultimately blackmails Mrs. Packletide to get what she wants).
