"All right. Tell you what I'll do. Here's a woman down on Washington Square wants a maid to wait on table. Can you do it?"
"I can try; but of course I've never done it before."
"I'll rent you a couple of references in the name of Bella Nimick—that'll cost you two dollars more, an' I guess I'll have to trust you for it—an' the cook down there—she deals with us—she'll give you some pointers on the job. You'll find it a good place. They're old swells, an' the name's Chamberlin."
Violet lost no time in seeking this new address. She found it to be a large brick house, with white marble steps, facing the leafy square from the north, and looking across the broad green lawn toward a church that towered into the blue skies by day and by night reached up toward Heaven with a fiery cross. The cook, to whom, through the areaway, she made her application, proved to be an ample Swedish woman, with a heart fashioned in true proportion to her body, and a round, placid face that spoke well for her mistress.
That mistress, Violet was without delay informed, was an invalid, whose ills, if mostly fanciful, were at least fancied with a force sufficient to keep her in town and in the house all summer long. Her husband—she had remarried after a divorce—passed the warm months visiting more wealthy friends along the rocky Maine coast, and her son ran in to see her between such invitations to Newport and Narragansett as he could secure. A daughter by the second union, a girl of sixteen, remained to care for her mother, and this child and a professional nurse, whose long service made her almost a member of the family, completed the household.
Violet was presented to Mrs. Chamberlin, a frail woman with a white, delicate face, lying on a couch in a darkened library, and, her references being casually read, was promptly engaged. She was to receive eighteen dollars a month for far lighter work than had been her portion under the sway of Mrs. Turner, and, as Bella Nimick, began at once to see that a better time was before her.
Objections there of course were, but these were not of a sort that either Violet's previous experience or present necessity permitted her to observe. Brought up in wealth, Mrs. Chamberlin's ideals had not been improved by that decline of fortune consequent upon her marriage. Neither in a practical nor in an executive sense had she received any training, and, though she would have told you that household management was woman's true sphere, she actually knew as little of it as she did of the wholesale drug trade. It had never occurred to her that cooking was even distantly related to chemistry and dietetics; scrubbing, dusting, and sweeping to hygiene, or domestic administration to bookkeeping. By the same token, the two servants had to share a dark, narrow room in the basement, had no sitting-room save the kitchen and, so far as social life went, would have been, had they depended upon the Chamberlin house, twin Selkirks on a Juan Fernandez.
But Violet was happy. Her health, if it did not improve, at least did not noticeably decline. The work, if it was hard, was at least possible of accomplishment. And within a week she had made herself so valuable to both her mistress and her mistress's nurse that these potentates found continuous need of her.
Then the first blow fell.
She had just put away the last of the dishes from an early dinner and was passing the barred front window of the basement when, from the sunset across the square, a shadow descended to the floor within. She looked up, startled. In the areaway a dapper, dark, flashily dressed young man was standing, and the young man was Angel.