"You know what the end's going to be; never mind, at all events I'll try and make you understand how it came.
"The family I got into was a lady and her two grown-up daughters, and a son of about five-and-twenty.

They lived in a small house at Shepherd's Bush.

My wages were very small, and I soon found out that they were a kind of people who keep up a great deal of show on very little means.
Of course I had to be let into all the secrets of their miserable shifts for dressing well on next to nothing at all, and they expected me--mother and daughters--to do the most wonderful and impossible things.

I had to turn old rags into smart new costumes, to trim worn-out hats into all manner of gaudy shapes, even to patch up boots in a way you couldn't imagine.

And they used to send me with money to buy things they were ashamed to go and buy themselves; then, if I hadn't laid out their few pence with marvellous result, they all but accused me of having used some of the money for myself.