"What's that?" she said.
"Your fare—one dollar."
"Oh!" Daisy's hand went to the bosom of her blouse, slipped in—and was presently withdrawn, somewhat blankly. She had left the purse on the dresser at the hotel. No use going back now. A little shrug dismissed the matter. That was Daisy's way with vicissitudes.
"Nothin' doin', huh?" the chauffeur's voice was humorously sharp, "Well, don't start makin' excuses. It won't," the young man glanced up at the mighty and singular front of the Harrison house, "it won't be hard to find you, as long as you're at this place. I'll come back for it."
Daisy dimpled and turned off again.
"Say," commented the taxi-driver, "you better not go in th' front door." Daisy was walking straight up to the front steps.
"Excuse me for buttin' in," her adviser continued, "but the front door is only for the people that lives here, or their dolled-up guests. I'm only tellin' you for your own good. If you was to go up there and ring the front door bell, like you was headed to do, they'd know you was a green hand, see, and most likely you wouldn't get the job you're after."
Daisy hadn't told her conductor she was after any job. He seemed to have a way of knowing things. She put up her chin a little, and did not look back, but thought it best to follow his advice. Without waiting to see whether she took it or not, he spun away down the other arm of the horseshoe-shaped drive, on his return to the street.
Passing down a walk at the side of the house, Daisy saw a girl looking out through a latticed gate. Evidently the sylph had phoned her housemaid friend to be "on the lookout".
"I thort you were never a-comin', I did," said the housemaid, who was a thin, white, dissatisfied figure, with a larynx almost as prominent as the "Adam's-apple" of a lean man. Alice was one who had worn herself out with the effort, first to avoid doing any more than the barely necessary, and second, to do this as perfunctorily as she could—which was very perfunctorily. Daisy had expected, somehow, to find her just as she was—that is to say, homelier than the skittish sylph, because otherwise she could not have been a friend of the latter.