"CARROTS cost money!"
"Yes, Emilie?"
"I had to throw several sous' worth at your window before you got awake this morning, and when they rolled back some of them fell in the gutter. Old Sempé saw me take them, and I'm sure he'll ask you to pay for them," said Emilie, nodding her round head with its well-oiled straight black hair. Emilie was no more gifted hirsutely than in other feminine adornments. Since the day we found her cleaning our apartment, at the request of the Sempés, I had been studying her carefully to decide whether new clothes and soap would help her appearance. Clean and togged out in some of my things, she was not radically changed. But her heart of gold shone in her eyes, and I was not long in learning to love her.
"You never hear that bell," continued Emilie. "What a conscience you must have to sleep that way. The carrots are cheaper than paying me from eight o'clock when you sleep on."
"Never mind about the carrots," I laughed. "We need you for an alarm clock, and we did not wake up until one fell on the bed."
Emilie was my first servant, and I did not have her all the time. All my life I had been demanding things from servants, but I had never bossed one in her housework. I dreaded tackling the problem. Emilie was the easy solution. The femme de ménage system is one of the advantages of life in Paris. You do not have to house your servant, and she is not in the way in a small apartment when you do not want her there. You can have as much or as little of the femme de ménage as you like, or (as was more often the case in my first year of Paris housekeeping) as you can afford to pay for. I put Emilie out of the house when the clock showed the number of times forty centimes per hour that I could spare. Forty centimes per hour, did I say? Yes, and that was ten centimes more than others paid in our street. Now it is a franc per hour, and the femmes de ménage of 1919 growl most of the time and stop work when they want to whether your house-cleaning or laundry is finished or not. Emilie set in deliberately to attach herself to me and accepted all my vagaries. I flatter myself that it was not so much for the extra two sous per hour as for the fact that she liked me. My queer ways interested her. She could never understand why I washed Scrappie's silk-and-wool undershirts myself, but was willing to pay her several francs for sitting on the coal-box reading a newspaper or dozing for hours while I went to the opera.
Emilie was a vaudeville singer and dancer who had lost her figure and most of her teeth before the bi-decennial of her stage career.
"To think, Madame, that a few years ago the posters on the Kiosque at the corner of this street used to announce my number at the music-halls, and to-day I'm down on the floor washing your tiles!"
I was pulling the baby's wool stockings on drying-boards.
"You say you used to be on the stage?" I led on sociably.