I had to go through the kitchen to get to Bessy's room. The kitchen was also the ante-chamber; you hung up your overcoat there. Her cook was her only servant, parlour-maid, chamber-maid, everything.
"Would you kindly walk into the saloon?" urged the servant.
"But announce me beforehand. Here's my card."
"Beg pardon, but I can't take it; both my hands are doughy." (She was in the middle of kneading some dough cake or other with butter.) "Would you kindly put your card between my teeth?"
Thus, like a retriever, she carried in my card between her teeth. A moment afterwards she cried:
"Come in now, please!"
I entered the room which the servant had called a saloon.
Nobody was there. I looked around me. I found nothing there of the luxurious splendour which had surrounded the young lady formerly in her mother's house; but for all that everything was neat and pretty. Embroideries, a music-stand with songs upon it, and a fiddle, flower-pots, a cage with exotic birds, Wallachian Katrinczas,[107] Szekler pottery, a few handsomely bound books—all these were so disposed as to fill the mind with a sense of refined elegance combined with the utmost simplicity.
[107] Aprons.
A curtained door led from the saloon into another room—possibly a bed-chamber.