“I suppose you’ll go and tell anyway, you old tattletale,” she said savagely. “I’ll get even with you for this, see if I don’t!” She ran out of the room and I didn’t see her again for several days.
However, I knew the locket had gone back where it belonged, because Mrs. Harper had me send Clarice a check for twenty-five dollars, with the brief statement that the locket had been found. Right there was where I lost some of my regard for Mrs. Harper. She never apologized to Clarice for accusing her wrongfully; never offered to do anything to make it up to her. She just sent that cold little note and the check. A real thoroughbred would have acknowledged herself to be in the wrong, but Mrs. Harper couldn’t bring herself to apologize to a servant. The affair blew over and I never heard Clarice mentioned again.
I grew to like my work more and more, as the days went by, and gradually learned to handle quite a bit of it myself. Mrs. Harper was very busy; she did a great deal of Red Cross and other war work, besides keeping up in all her clubs, and she got into the habit of telling me what to say to people and letting me write the letters myself. Early in March she went out of town to a convention and left me with a great many letters to write to various people, telling me to sign her name for her. I took very great pains with all those letters so as to be sure to say the right things to the right people, and I felt satisfied when the week was out that I had done myself credit.
Accordingly, it struck me like a thunderbolt when, several days after her return, Mrs. Harper came to me, blazing with anger, and demanded to know what I meant by writing such letters in her absence. Startled, I asked her what she referred to.
“You wrote Mr. Samuel Butler that if he didn’t hurry and pay up his subscription to the Red Cross Mr. Harper would pay it for him and take it out of his next bill,” said Mrs. Harper furiously. “Mr. Butler is insulted and has withdrawn his subscription of ten thousand dollars to the Perkins Settlement House, which I am trying so hard to establish. Whatever possessed you to write such a letter?”
“I never wrote a letter like that,” I replied with spirit. “I wrote Mr. Butler a very polite, respectful reminder that his pledge was due this month; I never mentioned Mr. Harper or anything about paying it and taking the amount out of any bill.”
I was completely at sea.
“You did write that letter!” declared Mrs. Harper angrily. “How dare you deny it? Mr. Butler showed it to me. It was written on this very stationery, on this typewriter with the green ribbon, and signed with my name in the way you sign it. You wrote it to be funny, I suppose. Well, I can tell you that I can’t have anything like that. I won’t have any further need for your services.”
She was so positive I had written it that I began to have an awful feeling that I might have written it in my sleep. You know what strange things I do in my sleep sometimes. But all the while I knew who had done it. Ethel Harper had sworn to get even with me for making her tell her mother about the locket. She had written that letter in place of the one I had written. I remembered that one day while Mrs. Harper was away I had been called downstairs and kept talking for over an hour to one of Mrs. Harper’s committee members who had undertaken to distribute some literature and came for instructions. During that time Ethel would have had plenty of chance to read through my mail upstairs.
I started to tell Mrs. Harper that I suspected someone else of writing it, intending to lead gently up to the subject of Ethel, but Mrs. Harper scoffed at the idea.