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“‘Miss Van Arden, I was going ’round to the kitchen door; I’ve come to see about the cook’s place.’

“‘I know,’ says she right quick, with a little lift of her pretty brown head. ‘I know,’ says she, ‘you’re Mrs. Biff, and you,’ says she, smiling so pretty on that Nellie trash, ‘ you’re Miss Small.’

“‘I am,’ says Nellie, tossing her head.

“So then she begins; and from that beginning, and calling us in that way, you can imagine how she went on. She explained that while she was a poor girl at her aunty’s she read a lovely book about an imaginary country called Altruria; and that the gentleman who wrote it didn’t think we could do that way in this country; she supposed we couldn’t, but she was going to try, and she hoped we would like her and help her. She didn’t know much about housekeeping; she had helped her aunty, but it was writing letters and doing errands and dusting brac-a-brac (and she laughed); the only things she knew how to do right well was to dust and to polish jewelry and make tea. But she hoped to learn; and she had got all the machinery she could think of; there was an electric washer and an ironing machine, and a dishwashing machine, and bread and cake machines, and we ought not to need to work more than eight hours a day. She didn’t believe really in more than six hours a day, but at first maybe we wouldn’t mind eight.

“I could see that Nellie drinking it all in, getting more topping every minute.

“‘Miss Van Arden,’ says she, ‘how about evenings? I’m used to having all my evenings.’

“‘I ain’t, madam,’ says I, ‘not if there’s dinner company. And I know well enough Nellie ain’t, neither.’

“‘I–I could have dinner in the middle of the day,’ says Miss Van Arden real pitiful, ‘if it weren’t that my sister comes in tired at night and likes a hot meal; but I’ve got a fireless stove, and it might be cooked and left in the fireless stove and we could wait on ourselves.’

“‘I guess that’ll be satisfactory,’ says Nellie, dipping her head and smiling a haughty smile, while I was quivering to git a word in Miss Van Arden’s ear. But, of course, there was no chance. And Miss Van Arden, she went on to say that she didn’t eat meat herself, but her sister liked to have it, so–‘

“‘I have to have meat myself,’ hops in that Nellie.

“‘Oh, of course,’ Miss Van Arden said; she didn’t dictate to others, but personally she didn’t eat meat; but she didn’t need any special vegetable dishes made for her.

“‘You shall have ’em if you want ’em, ma’am,’ says I; then, ‘and I guess the cook will have something to say about the kitchen table; I ain’t never much on meat myself.’ I guess that was one for miss!

“‘Oh, thank you,’ says Miss Van Arden real grateful–she’s jest as sweet’s they make ’em, Miss Patsy. Then she looked very timidly at Nellie and the color came into her face.

“‘I should like to have you take your meals with me if–if I were alone,’ she stammers, ‘but my sister–we have so little time together–we’ll try not to make much waiting–‘ She got into a kind of mess of stammers, when I cut in and told her that we much preferred to eat in our own pantry, which was big enough for a dining-room.

“Well, you can guess, Miss Patsy, that about this time I was wishing myself well out of it all, for I’ve lived with notional folks before, and folks who wanted to make friends of their help, and what I like with strangers is to have them keep their side of the fence and I’ll keep mine; I ain’t seeking any patronage from nobody, and I got too much self-respect not to be respectful. But I’d promised Mrs. Caines; so I simply told what wages I wanted, and I made ’em reasonable, too. But Nellie–my! she named a sum two dollars a week more’n she ever’d got and four dollars more’n she was worth; and for hatred of meddling I sat still and let that poor little sweet Babe in the Woods agree to it. But I miss my guess if I have to put up with Nellie long!