He did so, rather to her fright and vexation. She urged him in low tones to go away, but he continued to stand beside her on the doorstep, laughing at her annoyance, until a capped and aproned maid opened the door.
Then he lifted his hat, said “Good-night” very politely, and went away.
She never saw him again.
IV
Elsie found the life at 8, Mortimer Crescent, a pleasant contrast to that of her own home.
Mrs. Woolley herself never came downstairs before half-past nine or ten o’clock, and then she was very often only partly dressed, wearing a stained and rumpled silk kimono and a dirty lace-and-ribbon-trimmed boudoir cap. Elsie’s only duty in the morning was to keep the two children quiet while their mother slept. This she achieved by the simple expedient of letting them go to bed so late at night that they lay like little logs far on into the morning.
Elsie shared a bedroom with Gladys, and Sonnie’s cot was in a dressing-room opening into theirs.
The children were rather pallid and unwholesome, never quite free from colds or coughs, and seeming too spiritless even to be naughty. They went to a kindergarten school from eleven to four o’clock every day, and Elsie took them there and fetched them away again.
During the daytime she was supposed to dust the dining-room, drawing-room, and Mrs. Woolley’s bedroom, but she soon found out that no accumulation of dust, cigarette ends, or actual dirt would ever be noticed by the mistress of the house.
There was a general servant, who was inclined to resent Elsie’s presence in the house, and who left very soon after her arrival. Another one came, and was sent away at the end of a week’s trial because Mrs. Woolley said she was impertinent, and after an uncomfortable interim, during which Elsie nominally “did” the cooking, and they lived upon tinned goods and pressed beef, there came a short-lived succession of maids who never stayed.