“I cut and made every stitch I have on me.”
“You may go right upstairs, at seven dollars a week, with the others.”
A sweep of the hand illustrated the triumph; seven dollars was fine pay in those days.
One of her sisters was cook for many years for Oliver Wendell Holmes.
(“A little man, the face wrinkled”—and Mary’s eloquent hands made me see the Doctor again in person.) He took care of her money for her; and Mary has often told me how one day, after many years, he said,
“Now, Anna, you are a rich woman; you need never work again, and can do what you like.”
She bought a nice little house in one of the suburbs.
“But a year was all she could stand of it. She couldn’t make out to live, away from the Holmeses, and back she goes to them.”
Mary married at twenty, and lived quietly in Chelsea for five and twenty years. Then her husband died, and instead of going home to the farm, or staying on where she was, to take boarders, this born adventurer was off to see the world.
“I hadn’t seen, not one thing, cooped up there in Chelsea. I wanted to find out about new things, and new places, whilst I was strong.”