[Rudder Grange by Frank R. Stockton]@TWC D-Link bookRudder Grange CHAPTER III 5/13
I was sorry that he had to do it. "If I were in your place," said he, "I would get her a servant." "If you were in my place," I replied, somewhat cuttingly, "you would probably suggest a lot of little things which would make everything very easy for her." "I'd try to," he answered, without getting in the least angry. Although I felt annoyed that he had suggested it, still I made up my mind that Euphemia must have a servant. She agreed quite readily when I proposed the plan, and she urged me to go and see the carpenter that very day, and get him to come and partition off a little room for the girl. It was some time, of course, before the room was made (for who ever heard of a carpenter coming at the very time he was wanted ?) and, when it was finished, Euphemia occupied all her spare moments in getting it in nice order for the servant when she should come.
I thought she was taking too much trouble, but she had her own ideas about such things. "If a girl is lodged like a pig, you must expect her to behave like a pig, and I don't want that kind." So she put up pretty curtains at the girl's window, and with a box that she stood on end, and some old muslin and a lot of tacks, she made a toilet-table so neat and convenient that I thought she ought to take it into our room and give the servant our wash-stand. But all this time we had no girl, and as I had made up my mind about the matter, I naturally grew impatient, and at last I determined to go and get a girl myself. So, one day at lunch-time, I went to an intelligence office in the city. There I found a large room on the second floor, and some ladies, and one or two men, sitting about, and a small room, back of it, crowded with girls from eighteen to sixty-eight years old.
There were also girls upon the stairs, and girls in the hall below, besides some girls standing on the sidewalk before the door. When I made known my business and had paid my fee, one of the several proprietors who were wandering about the front room went into the back apartment and soon returned with a tall Irishwoman with a bony weather-beaten face and a large weather-beaten shawl.
This woman was told to take a chair by my side.
Down sat the huge creature and stared at me.
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