"She knows what she does want!" whispered a decent-appearing young woman to a girl at her side with an eager face looking out from a friz of short curly hair, "and that's more than half of 'em do."
"Country, did you say, ma'am? or city?" asked the directress once more of Miss Henderson.
"I didn't say. It's country, though—twenty miles out."
"What wages?"
"I'll find the girl first, and settle that afterwards."
"Anybody to do general housework in the country, twenty miles out?"
The prevailing expression of the assemblage changed. There was a settling down into seats, and a resumption of knitting and needlework.
One pair of eyes, however, looked on, even more eagerly than before. One young girl—she with the short curly hair who hadn't seen the country for six years and more—caught her breath, convulsively, at the word.
"I wish I dar'st! I've a great mind!" whispered she to her tidy companion.
While she hesitated, a slatternly young woman, a few seats farther forward, moved, with a "don't care" sort of look, to answer the summons.