He smiled openly at that:
"Mrs. Price, you can trust me. This is not my first case."
After that there was talk of financial arrangements and future plans. Mr. Larkin thought he would come out to Berkeley in a day or two and take a lodging in the village. When he had anything of moment to impart he would drop a note to Mrs. Price and she could designate a rendezvous. They parted amicably, Suzanne feeling that she had found the right man and Mr. Larkin secretly elated, for this was the first case of real magnitude that had come his way.
At the appointed time Suzanne met Mrs. Janney at the tea room and on the way home they exchanged their news. The nursery governess had been found, approved and engaged, and the oculist had said to go on with the lotion and if Bébita's eyes did not improve to bring her in to see him. Both ladies agreed that their labors had exhausted them, but each looked unusually vivacious and mettlesome.
[CHAPTER VIII—MOLLY'S STORY]
I've been asked to tell the part of this story in which I figure. I've done that kind of work before, so I'm not as shy as I was that first time, and since then I've studied some, and come up against fine people, and I'm older—twenty-seven on my last birthday. But as I said then, so I'll say now—don't expect any stylish writing from me. At the switchboard there's still ginger in me, but with the pen I'm one of the "also rans."
Fortunately for me, I was always a good one to throw a bluff and, having made a few excursions into the halls of the rich and great, I felt I could be safely featured as a nursery governess. She belongs in the layer between the top and bottom and doesn't mix with either. I wouldn't have to play down to the kitchen standards or up to the parlor ones, just move along, sort of lonesome, in the neutral ground between. As for teaching the child, I knew I could do that as well as the girls who are marking time until they marry, or the decayed ladies who employ their declining years and intellects that way.
It didn't seem to me hard to size up the family. Mrs. Janney was the head of it, the middle and both ends—a real queen who didn't need a crown or a throne to make people bow the knee. Mr. Janney was a good, kind old gentleman who was too law-abiding to get rich any way but the way he did. Mrs. Price wasn't up to their measure—an only child, born with a silver lining. She was one of those slimpsy, thin women that a man would be afraid to hug for fear she'd crack in his arms or snap in the middle. She was very cordial and pleasant to me and I will say she was fond of her little girl.
When I came to the servants I couldn't see but what every one of them registered honesty. If it had been printed on their foreheads with a rubber stamp it couldn't have been plainer. There were only two new ones in the outfit—girls, one of them my chambermaid—and no one, not even a sleuth desperate for glory, could have considered them. Outside there were gardeners and chauffeurs—in all there were twenty-one people employed—but it was the same with them. They were a decent, well-paid lot, the garage men and head gardener living on the place, the laborers lodged in the village.
The one person my eye lingered on was Miss Maitland the Secretary. Not that there was anything suspicious about her, but that she wasn't as simple and easy to see into as the others. She was a handsome girl, tall and well made, sticking close to her job and not having much to do with any one. Her study was just under the day nursery where we had lessons and had its own door on to the piazza. When she wasn't at work, she'd either sit there reading or go off walking by herself and there was something solitary and serious about her that interested me. The nursery window was a good look-out, commanding the lawns and garden and with the tennis court to one side. After lessons I'd let the blinds down and coil up there on a cushion, and I saw her several times coming in and going out, always alone, and always looking thoughtful and depressed.