“‘You’re not to worry,’ says I. ‘There’s more ways than one of earning, an’ if my eyes is bad, I’ve got two hands an’ know how to use ’em. I’ll take a place an’ do housework if I can’t do nothing else.’
“You’d never believe how the thought o’ that weighed on him. He’d wake me up in the night to say, ‘Now, Almiry, jest give up that thought an’ promise me you’ll try something else. I think I’d turn in my grave if I had to know you was slavin’ in anybody’s kitchen.’
“‘What’s the odds?’ I said. ‘You have to be under orders whatever you do. I think it won’t be a bad change from the shop.’
“He took on so, though, that to quiet him I promised him I wouldn’t do it unless I had to, an’ ’twasn’t long after that that he died. Between the doctor’s bill—an’ he was a kind man, I will say, an’ didn’t charge a tenth of what he had ought to—an’ the funeral an’ all, I was cleaned out of everything. I’d had to pawn a month before he died, an’ was just stripped. Sewing was no good. My eyes went back on me like everything else, an’ in a fortnight I knew there wasn’t anything for it but getting a place. I left such things as I had in charge of the old ladies an’ answered an advertisement for ‘a capable girl willing to work.’
“Well, it was a handsome house an’ elegant things in the parlors an’ bedrooms, but my heart sunk when she took me into the kitchen. The last girl had gone off in a rage an’ left everything, an’ there was grease and dirt from floor to ceiling. It was a deep basement, with one window an’ a door opening right into the area with glass set in it, an’ iron bars to both; but dirty to that degree you couldn’t see three feet beyond; cockroaches walking round at their ease an’ water-bugs so thick you didn’t know where to lay anything.
“‘You’ll have things quite your own way,’ the lady said, ‘for I never come into the kitchen. Bridget attends to upstairs, but you attend to fires and the meals and washing and ironing, and I expect punctuality and everything well done.’
“‘At least it sounds independent,’ I thought, and I made up my mind to try it, for the wages were fifteen dollars a month, an’ that with board seemed doing well. Bridget came down presently. She was seventeen an’ a pretty girl rather, but she looked fit to drop, an’ fell down in a chair.
“‘It’s the bell,’ she said. ‘The comin’ an’ goin’ here niver ceases, an’ whin ’tisn’t the front door it’s her own bell, an’ she’ll jingle it or holler up the tube in the middle o’ the night if she takes a notion.’
“I wouldn’t ask questions, for I thought I should find out soon enough, so I said I’d like to go up to my room a minute.
“‘It’s our room you’ll mane,’ she said. ‘There’s but the one, an’ it’s hard enough for two to be slapin’ on a bed that’s barely the width o’ one.’