‘It’s—it’s no so bad but what I can bear it.’
Which of these two gave in first I cannot tell, though to me fell the duty of persuading them, for whichever she was she rebelled as soon as the other showed signs of yielding, so that sometimes I had two converts in the week but never both on the same day. I would take them separately, and press the one to yield for the sake of the other, but they saw so easily through my artifice. My mother might go bravely to my sister and say, ‘I have been thinking it over, and I believe I would like a servant fine—once we got used to her.’
‘Did he tell you to say that?’ asks my sister sharply.
‘I say it of my own free will.’
‘He put you up to it, I am sure, and he told you not to let on that you did it to lighten my work.’
‘Maybe he did, but I think we should get one.’
‘Not for my sake,’ says my sister obstinately, and then my mother comes ben to me to say delightedly, ‘She winna listen to reason!’
But at last a servant was engaged; we might be said to be at the window, gloomily waiting for her now, and it was with such words as these that we sought to comfort each other and ourselves:—
‘She will go early to her bed.’
‘She needna often be seen upstairs.’