The bookish old man, it turned out, was called Christopher Lilly. The nieame was Maud. They lived west of London, out Maidenhead-way, near a village named Marlow, and in a house they called Briar. Gentlemans plan was to sehere alone, by train, in two days time. He himself, he said, must stay in London for another week at least, to do the old mans business over the bindings of his books.
I didnt care much for the detail of my travelling down there, and arriving at the house, all on my own. I had never been much further west before than the Cremardens, where I sometimes went with Mr Ibbss nephews, to watch the dang on a Saturday night. I saw the French girl cross the river on a wire from there, and almost drop—that was something. They say she wore stogs; her legs looked bare enough to me, though. But I recall standing on Battersea Bridge as she walked her rope, and looking out, past Hammersmith, to all the tryside beyond it, that was just trees
and hills and not a ey or the spire of a chur sight—and oh! that was a very chilling thing to see. If you had said to me then, that I would one day leave the Bh, with all my pals in it, and Mrs Sucksby and Mr Ibbs, and go quite aloo a maids pla a house the other side of those dark hills, I should have laughed in your face.
But Gentleman said I must go soon, in case the lady—Miss Lilly—should spoil our plot, by actally taking anirl to be her servant. The day after he came to Lant Street he sat and wrote her out a letter. He said he hoped she would pardon the liberty of his writing, but he had been on a visit to his old hat had been like a mother to him, when he was a boy—and he had found her quite demented with grief, over the fate of her dead sisters daughter. Of course, the dead sisters daughter was meant to be me: the story was, that I had been maiding for a lady who was marrying and heading off for India, and had lost my place; that I was looking out for another mistress, but was meanwhile beied on every side to go to the bad; and that if only some softhearted lady would give me the ce of a situation far away from the evils of the city—and so on.
I said, If shell believe bouncers like those, Gentleman, she must be even sillier than you first told us.
But he answered, that there were about a hundred girls betweerand and Piccadilly, who dined very handsomely off that story, five nights a week; and if the hard swells of London could be separated from their shillings by it, then how much kinder wasnt Miss Maud Lilly likely to be, all alone and unknowing and sad as she was, and with no-oo tell her aer?
Youll see, he said. And he sealed the letter and wrote the dire, and had one of our neighbours boys run with it to the post.
Then, so sure was he of the success of his plan, he said they must begin at oo teach me horoper ladys maid should be.
First, they washed my hair. I wore my hair then, like lots of the Bh girls wore theirs, divided in three, with a b at the bad, at the sides, a few fat curls. If you turhe curls with a very hot iron, having first made the hair wet with sugar-and-water, you
could make them hard as anything; they would last for a week like that, or lentleman, however, said he thought the style too fast for a try lady: he made me wash my hair till it erfectly smooth, then had me divide it once—just the ohen pin it in a plain knot at the bay head. He had Dainty wash her hair, too, and when I had bed and re-bed mine, and pinned