She came to me with tears streaming over her face. When she had turned over her mop and pail to me she fell on her knees, and, burying her face in her apron, knelt beside the bathtub, rocking her body back and forth and sobbing. The Princess Royal and her sister German sympathizer took the next train to Philadelphia. They were replaced by two Swedes, quiet, hard-working girls.
The middle of my second week the housekeeper told me that Mrs. Sutton wished me to go out with her that evening after dinner. Heretofore the housekeeper had accompanied her on these evening automobile trips. Now the old woman complained of feeling unwell and I was to take her place. The car that evening was a fast roadster with three seats. I sat on the back seat. After a run of about an hour we stopped at a country inn. Mrs. Sutton told me that I might either come in or remain in the car.
It was a lovely evening during the last of May. Sure that our stop would be only for a few minutes, I decided to remain in the car; Mrs. Sutton followed by the chauffeur, a young Italian with good legs, entered the inn. After waiting in the car for more than a half-hour, and feeling cramped from sitting so long, I got out and strolled around the grounds. Finally, prompted by a desire to kill time, I stepped up on the piazza and looked in through a window.
Mrs. Sutton and the chauffeur were having supper together. By a casual observer they might easily have been mistaken for lovers. After their meal they joined the dancers. More than an hour later they returned to the car in which I had resumed my seat about fifteen minutes earlier. It was well past two o’clock when we finally returned to Sutton House.
The next morning I got up soon after sunrise and sat at the window of my room. There had been a warm shower during the earlier hours, and the gardens and grove looked like Paradise—the perfectly kept lawns, the flowers just beginning to give a touch of color here and there, the great trees with their young leaves softly green and glistening. And over all a clear blue sky, through which floated banks of wonderful white clouds that looked as though they might have been freshly washed by the angels. Young summer, like a spirit, walked.
With all this peace and beauty around me I sat and dreamed. At first it was not a pleasant dream though it concerned a new combination—a discovery that, as a rule, thrills a writer. In my dream I questioned if in place of time-worn love-affairs between masters and serving-maids, we writers of realism would have to depict mistresses courting straight-legged chauffeurs. The idea was too repulsive. In spite of the scene witnessed the night before, the tears of the doll-baby young woman at the publishing house and other whispered hints, I refused to believe it. Even though such a diseased condition was creeping in I was sure it would be wiped out by the World War before it had time to take root.
The thought of the war caused my dreams to change. I had my first vision of America, perhaps the world, as it would be after the terrible conflict in which my country had just entered. After it—for surely good must come of so great a disaster—there would be no idle, untrained women to menace human progress. In America we would have neither human cooties nor human drudges; all such inhuman creatures wiped out by the war, we would become a nation of workers, struggling to carry out the ideals of the founders of our country.
During breakfast I notified the housekeeper that I must leave at the end of the week. She remonstrated vigorously. When her offer to increase my wages failed to move me she confided to me her plan for my promotion. She, it appeared, had been the nursery-governess of Mrs. Sutton, had remained in the family, and when her former pupil married had taken charge of her new home as housekeeper. Now, the old woman continued, having saved enough to keep her comfortable, she wished to spend her last days among her own people in England. I was to take her position as housekeeper.
Even that did not cause me to change my mind. I told her that I must go and not later than the end of that week. Along toward the middle of the morning Mrs. Sutton’s French maid came to me. Madame wished to see me in her bedroom at once. On entering Mrs. Sutton’s room, a fable told me by Booger when I was a very small child flashed into my mind.
Booger was a young negro who served my father’s family in the double capacity of stable-boy and my nurse. Born during that period when the fortunes of the people of the Southern States were at lowest ebb, resulting from our Civil War, I did not share the advantage of being nursed by the “Mammy” adored by my older sisters and brothers. So far as I know, my father’s stable-boy was my only nurse. And so far as I have been able to learn, nobody knows why I bestowed on him the name of Booger. To the rest of the world he was Peter.