'It is not summer in September. If the weather chooses to pretend it is I cannot help it. It is autumn, and I will no longer endure the want of social gatherings. Invariably I find the time between the last Coffee of spring and the first of autumn almost unendurable. What do you do, Rose-Marie, up there on that horrible mountain of yours, to pass the time?'
Pass the time? I who am so much afraid of Time's passing me that I try to catch at him as he goes, pull him back, make him creep slowly while I squeeze the full preciousness out of every minute? I gazed at her abstractedly, haunted by the recollection of flying days, days gone so quickly, vanished before I well knew how happy I was being. 'I really couldn't tell you,' I said.
'Hard-working, clean, honest,—' read out the Fräulein, reminding me that I was busy.
'Moral,' I dictated, 'able to wash—'
'You will never find one,' interrupted Frau Meyer again. 'At least, never one who is both moral and able to wash. Two good things don't go together with these girls, I find. The trouble I am in for want of one! They are as scarce and as expensive as roses in December. Since April I have had three, and all had to leave by the merest accident—nothing at all to do with the place or me; but the ones in there seem to know there have been three in the time, and make the most extravagant demands. I have been here the whole morning, and am in despair.'
She stopped to fan herself with her handkerchief.
'Able to wash,' I resumed, 'iron, cook, mend—have you any one suitable, Fräulein?'
'Many,' was the laconic answer.
'I'm afraid we cannot give more than a hundred and sixty marks,' said I.
'Pooh,' said Frau Meyer; and there was a pause in the scratching of the pen.