Pixie received the intelligence that she was to begin her new duties on the following Monday with the unruffled composure of one who has expected no other decision. She asked eagerly what salary she was to receive, and was a trifle depressed to find that it did not run to three figures. Thirty pounds sounded very little, though she had only the vaguest notion of its purchasing value, but her ambition had been to supply the whole additional sum which was needed for the support of the household.
Innocent Bridgie had no idea as to what might be expected under the circumstances, but Miss Munns, who knew everything, declared that the offer was a handsome one, and ten pounds in excess of the ordinary rate of payment. Still, as she sagely remarked, one could never tell! People sometimes seemed very generous and pleasant-spoken at first, and then turned out everything that was exacting and unreasonable. Several young friends of her own had gone out as governesses, and met with tragic adventures. Marianne Summers, the cousin of Summers’ Celebrated Snowflake Soap, was with a family at Rochester, and nursed a little boy all through scarlatina, and when she had toothache herself the lady said it was most inconvenient because a dinner-party was coming. No consideration whatever, and the food very poor. She was never so much as asked to have a second helping!
“Maybe the lady had so many to help that she forgot to ask her. Couldn’t she ask herself? It would have been more friendly than grumbling behind her back,” said Pixie severely. “When I go out to meals with people I make myself at home. I went to déjeuner with some friends in Paris, and I was so much at home that when they had cabbage, I remarked that I wished it had been cauliflower. They smiled, and looked quite pleasant!”
Miss Munns looked over her spectacles, and grunted to herself. She considered Pixie O’Shaughnessy a most uncomfortable girl, and was never at ease in her society. She asked embarrassing questions, stared with unconcealed curiosity, while her innocence had a trick of developing into quite remarkable shrewdness at sudden and inappropriate moments. Miss Munns recalled several incidents when the gaze of the childlike eyes had filled her with a most unpleasant embarrassment, and declared that not for fifty thousand pounds would she have that child living in her house!
Bridgie was different. She was invariably anxious to hear further anecdotes concerning relations and friends, and was such a docile pupil in domestic matters, that the old lady had the felicity of practically ruling two households instead of one. In the fervour of her resolve to turn over a new leaf, Bridgie had made no reservations, but had placed herself and her accounts in Miss Munns’s hands, and from that moment there was no drawing back. The weekly orders were supervised and cut down, the accounts carefully checked and paid to the hour, the receipts were endorsed and filed, so that they could
be produced at a moment’s notice; extras were faithfully entered into the housekeeping ledger at the end of each day, and the whole account balanced to a laborious penny. When the penny was very difficult to find, Bridgie pleaded hard to be allowed to supply it from her private purse, and could never be quite brought to see that the result would not be the same, but it was a proud moment when Jack surveyed the ledger on Saturday evenings and wrote, “Examined, and found correct!” with a big flourish underneath the final addition. Then he would stroke his moustache and twinkle at her with amused eyes, as he said—
“Bravo, Bridgie, right to a fraction! I’ll ask Miss Munns to take me in hand next—since she has scored such a triumph out of you. Evening classes two or three times a week, with Sylvia to sit by me and sharpen my pencils—that would be a happy way of combining instruction and amusement for the winter evenings, wouldn’t it?” and—shades of Esmeralda!—Bridgie smiled, and ejaculated, “You naughty boy!” in a tone as far removed from fault-finding as it is possible to imagine.
Sylvia Trevor, however, being a young woman of spirit, was by no means disposed to provide amusement for Master Jack or any other masculine flirt. If any man wished to win her, she was worth wooing seriously, so she told herself with a tilt of the pretty dark head, but when Jack said one thing with his lips, beseeching Miss Munns to take pity on his ignorance, and put him on the path whereon he should walk, and another with his eyes, mutely inviting her to stay and flirt with him the while he pretended to listen—then her pride was roused, and she determined to teach him a wholesome lesson. She waited until Miss Munns had produced half a dozen ledgers to demonstrate the elaborate system of book-keeping by which she conducted her miniature establishment—until Jack had seated himself by her side and was irrevocably victimised for the evening; then she rose from her chair and said amiably—
“I mustn’t disturb you. You will like to be quiet, so I’ll run across and chat to Bridgie for an hour, while you are away!”