No suitable maiden had presented herself when Pollie’s departing day arrived. But Mrs. Brand, far from being disconcerted by this, had been thinking it an advisable course of circumstances, and ignoring all Lucy’s wishes in the contrary direction.
“I should prefer to have the two girls here together for a day or two,” Lucy had pleaded; “then the newcomer would see just what was expected from her.”
“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Brand with decision. “Never allow your old servant and your new one to meet. Even in my house, it is always a comfort when there is a regular clearance. The old ones put the stranger up to all your weaker points, tell them just where they can deceive you, and the demands they would advise them to make, ‘if they would begin as they would like to go on.’ Consequently you never really have even the brief advantage of ‘the new broom that sweeps well.’”
“I cannot regard Pollie as a natural enemy,” Lucy answered. “I feel sure she would say the place is a good one, that we are not ill to live with, and that a girl who could not get on with us must be hard to please.”
Mrs. Brand laughed gaily.
“Will you ever learn wisdom, my dear?” she said. “You persist in judging Pollie by yourself. But would you have treated anybody as she has just treated you?—suddenly casting off an old tie precisely at a critical time?”
“Yet it is certainly for a great event in her life,” replied Lucy. “Of course, I feel that in her place I should have acted differently. For one thing, I hate secrecy, and if Pollie had told me of her future intentions the moment they were decided (as I told her of mine), and had not resolved to make the great jump at a moment’s notice, as it were, without any reference to us, then I think there might have been very little trouble in the adjusting of our interests. She might have seen me well over my sorrows and difficulties without much hindrance of her own happiness.”
Mrs. Brand broke into explosions of merriment.
“Pollie and her future intentions!” she echoed. “I daresay she met the man only the week before! With these people, we waste our judgments in quite wrong directions.”
“Pollie told me she had known the man for years,” said Lucy.