“You don’t know what it is yet!” said the lady, quite cheerfully. “This is the third day I’ve been here—staying on till the afternoon. I’ve seen nobody suitable yet.”
“May I ask if you have ever hired a servant here before?” said Mrs. Challoner.
“I have not,” replied the stranger; “but my husband’s sister did. She came here daily for nearly a week, and when she got a suitable girl, she only stayed two months, because she heard of another place in a neighbourhood she liked better!”
“I wonder almost that you are making this experiment after that experience!” remarked Lucy.
“It does not seem very encouraging,” answered the other; “but what is one to do? And when we get them they don’t work, and don’t they waste and destroy! I wish we could do without servants altogether! I think I could get along finely—if it wasn’t for opening the street door. One cannot do that, you know.”
Lucy was silent, considering. It seemed to her, at that moment, that if Charlie was at home, and no duty of breadwinning lay upon herself, then rather than endure a prolongation and repetition of her present experience, she would spend the remainder of her life in opening her street door to all comers.
The lady accepted her silence as sympathy.
“My sister-in-law says the same,” she went on. “She and her husband have a flat—a pretty little flat near the Parks, where they are rather expensive, so they have one with only five rooms—and they’ve just got one little child. And Minnie says she could manage quite well, if it wasn’t for taking out the perambulator.”
“I always took out my boy myself,” said Lucy, with her arm about Hugh’s neck, “and I often opened the hall door—generally, indeed—because I could see who was coming from my window, and it saved my maid’s running up a flight of stairs.”
The stranger looked at her rather coldly.