“Protect me!” she sneered. “You, my husband’s detective! Yes, that’s who you are. My husband got you out here to watch me. You—you sneak!”
I let her talk until she wore herself out. When she again tried to ring for her maid I rang for the housekeeper.
The housekeeper came. Honest old soul! On these evening trips when she acted as chaperon they had gone in a touring-car. When they stopped at a road-house she had always remained comfortably dozing in the tonneau.
“I shall take you straight to your mother, Mildred,” the housekeeper informed Mrs. Sutton, when I had explained the situation. And I realized that she had gone back twenty years, and was again the governess threatening her spoiled charge. “Your mother will know what to do with you.”
Feeling in honor bound to clear Mr. Sutton of the suspicion of employing a detective I reminded his wife in the housekeeper’s presence that no person who had entered her home in such a capacity would have given so candid a reason for leaving. The old woman swept the suspicion aside with a wave of her hand. Mr. Sutton was a gentleman, she assured me. There should be no scandal, for Mildred’s mother knew how to manage her daughter.
While I was packing my few belongings the housekeeper came to my room. She would always be grateful to me, she said, for ringing for her and not allowing Mildred to call the “French fool.” Then she offered to give me a letter of recommendation and I accepted it. When paying the wages due me she included my railroad ticket back to New York City. Not once did she ask me to hold my tongue.
On returning to New York I learned that Mrs. Tompkins had ordered Alice home; the hat-trimming season being over, Mrs. Wilkins was preparing to resume her duties in the linen-room of the Coney Island hotel; and the little organist had already gone to Maine to spend the summer with her mother and sisters. The restaurant-keeper, having been mysteriously robbed of all his trousers excepting the pair he was wearing, declared to me his intention to “get out.” The reporter was shortly to take up his suit-case and walk, and the gentleman of many shoes and walking-sticks greeted me with the information that he had purchased a water-front estate on the Sound.
It would seem that I should have been eagerly preparing to write the story of Polly Preston. Certainly I would never be able to incorporate in one novel all the material I had already accumulated. Yet I never was farther from wishing to begin a book. It may have been the general unrest caused by the war. Even now I can give no explanation for my mental condition at that time. So, instead of returning to my own field, I set out the following morning to get a new job.
Having secured all previous positions through the help-wanted columns of the newspapers, I now determined to try employment agencies. My plan was to register at an agency making a specialty of supplying domestic servants, pay the required fee, and leave my three letters of recommendation. These three letters! One, as stated, was given me by the housekeeper of Sutton House. The other two I had used getting in at Sea Foam—one written by Alice from her Washington City address, the other written by myself in my own proper person. In it I had stated that Emily Porter had been for twenty years in the service of my mother, and since my mother’s death she had been in my employ.
After the writers of these letters were communicated with I expected, in course of time, to get the refusal of a position in a private family—as waitress, second girl, or chambermaid. That was as I expected the matter to develop.