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Updated: July 26, 2025
Samuel Weller. In the midst of all this jollity and conviviality, a loud ring was heard at the garden gate, to which the young gentleman who took his meals in the wash-house, immediately responded. Mr. Weller was in the height of his attentions to the pretty house-maid; Mr.
"Who is Jessie?" he asked, for he was more interested in the smallest detail of this strange, bewilderingly lovely girl's life than his father's affairs. "Jessie is my maid. I call her mine, because she is very much attached to me; but she is really our house-maid, parlour-maid. We have very few servants: I suppose you have a great many up at the new house?" He nodded.
Then she looked up again with almost an embarrassed air. "I am afraid I spoke sharply when you knocked. I feared it might be Jane again, and after the scene I have had with her I really do not want to see her for some time yet. She has quarrelled with the house-maid, and both have given me notice; and what to do I don't know, just at the beginning of term and all."
Her out-of-doors costume suggested that she was either just going out or just returned, and Curtis, unaccustomed to the domestic problem as it exists in New York, fancied that she ranked above the level of a house-maid. "Is Miss Grandison in?" he asked. "I'll inquire, sir. What name shall I say?" It was a noncommittal answer, so he changed ground in the next question.
"Well, I noticed it a little once or twice before," said the agitated house-maid; "but I thought it came in at the open window. But to-day, just now, when I opened the drawer of the young gentleman's wash-stand to clean it, out jumped a live frog. I opened another and there were a lot of spiders crawling about!
In the absence of Mrs. Crawford, who for a week or more had been domesticated in the cottage in the lane, as the house was designated which Arthur had given her, there was no one to receive the strangers except the cook and the house-maid, and as Mrs. Tracy entered the hall the two came forward, bristling with criticism, and ready to resent anything like interference in the new-comers.
The attentive house-maid disrobed me, and bathed my chilled and frosted feet and swollen hands in water tempered with alcohol. Then arraying me in a mob-cap and snowy cotton gown, the property of good Mrs. Jessup, placed me in the soft nest prepared for sojourners beneath that homely but hospitable roof. "I hope thee is comfortable, Miriam Monfort," said Mrs. Jessup, after I was ensconced in bed.
The morning after her arrival at Kingdon, Bettina, having breakfasted in her room, went for a ramble over the house. It seemed solemnly vast and empty, and she would have lost herself many times had she not encountered now and then a courtesying house-maid or an obsequious footman, who answered her inquiries and told her into what apartments she had strayed.
This was a feat which was attended by more than one risk: if you did not give a prominent leap off the narrow space from the top of the gate, you would very likely be caught up by the tulle fountain of your dress, in which case you might easily lose your life; or, if you did not keep your eye on the time, you would very likely be caught by an early house-maid, in which case you might easily lose your reputation.
"But there's matches in your room," she said, "and if you go careful you'll be all right. Mind the step at the end of the passage. Your room is just beyond." I looked ahead as she spoke, and half-way down the passage, I saw a woman standing. She drew back into a doorway as we passed, and the house-maid didn't appear to notice her.
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