“It means that you are to send me to the nearest railroad-station, and at once.”
Then I told her what I thought of her, and my words came straight from the shoulder. I reminded her that she had hired me as a gentlewoman, yet she had not provided me a place in which I could so much as bathe in privacy. If she had not sufficient money to pay decent wages to workers, I asked why she had bought that additional ten acres of land. I reminded her that she already had more land than could be used by the class of children cared for at Rodman Hall.
Furthermore, I told her that if ever I saw her advertisement, similar to the one by which she had trapped the professor’s widow and myself, I would go to see the owner of the newspaper in which it appeared. I would show the schedule of work she had mapped out for me, tell him of other women whom she had decoyed, and ask why he published the advertisements of such fakers.
It was then that Mrs. Howard did everything except offer bodily violence to induce me to return that schedule.
On returning to New York I took the schedule at once to a reputable agency for domestic servants. Pretending that I was acting in behalf of a friend who lived in the country, I showed the two typed pages to the manager, and asked for a maid who would do that work for fifteen dollars a month. The manager glared at me. She assured me that it was impossible for one woman to do so much work even in a twenty-four-hour day. She didn’t exactly show me the door, but the manner in which she looked at it was pointed.
At the next agency the manager was more polite. She advised me to induce my friend to get three girls. Even then, she explained, my friend would have to pay the girls at least twenty dollars a month each.
“We don’t have as many greenhorns coming over as we used to,” she told me, “and even those we do have demand more money. Twenty dollars a month is very little these days even for the poorest servant.”
The woman in charge at the next agency brusquely informed me that she had too much respect for herself to offer such a job to any girl, even the most ignorant immigrant. My friend, she added, should be forced to do all that work herself, then she might understand why she couldn’t get a girl.
At the fifth agency I was treated as a half-witted creature to whom the manager was forced by her own self-respect to be polite. Evidently, she told me, I had no experience with housework. Otherwise I would know that it would be impossible for a human being, man or woman, however skilled, to accomplish so much work in one day. If my friend’s home was near a popular beach, or offered an equally desirable summer attraction, she might get me two women. Wages? Thirty-five dollars a month each, perhaps more.
Determined to give Mrs. Howard a square deal I called on my Y. W. C. A. friend. After reading the advertisement and the schedule, she computed the beds in the four dormitories and their sleeping-porches.