Her husband urged her to try a new servant, saying there was no necessity for her to make a slave of herself; but she refused to listen. Economy was a part of her nature, and besides that she meant to show them that she was perfectly independent of the whole tribe; the tribe and them referring to the hired girls alone, for she knew no one else in town.
No one had called, and a bow from Mrs. Atherton, whom she had seen at church was all the recognition she had received from her neighbors up to the hot July morning, a week or more after the house-maid's departure, when she was busy in the kitchen canning black raspberries, of which the garden was full.
Like many housekeepers who do their own work, Dolly was not very particular with regard to her dress in the morning, and on this occasion her hair was drawn from her rather high forehead, and twisted into a hard knot at the back of her head; her calico dress hung straight down, for she was minus hoops, which in those days were very large; her sleeves were rolled above her elbows, and, as a protection against the juice of the berries, she wore an apron made of sacking. In this garb, and with no thought of being interrupted, she kept on with her work until the last kettle of fruit was boiling and bubbling on the stove, and she was just glancing at the clock to see if it were time to put over the peas for dinner, when there came a quick, decisive ring at the front door.
"Who can that be?" she said to herself, as she wiped her hands upon her apron. "Some peddler, I dare say. Why couldn't he come round to the kitchen door, I'd like to know?"
She had been frequently troubled with peddlers and feeling certain that this was one—she started for the door in no very amiable frame of mind, for peddlers were her abomination. Something ailed the key, which resisted all her efforts to turn it; and at last, putting her mouth to the keyhole, she called out, rather sharply:
"Go to the back door, I can't open this."
Then, as she caught a whiff of burnt sirup, she hurried to the kitchen, where she found that her berries had boiled over, and were hissing and sputtering on the hot stove, raising a cloud of smoke so dense that she did not see the person who stood on the threshold of the door until a voice wholly unlike that of any peddler said to her:
"Good-morning, Mrs. Tracy. I hope I am not intruding."
Then she turned, and, to her horror and surprise, saw Grace Atherton, attired in the coolest and daintiest of morning costumes, with a jaunty French bonnet set coquettishly upon her head, and a silver card-case in her hand.
For the moment Dolly's wits forsook her, and she stood looking at her visitor, who, perfectly at her ease, advanced into the room, and said:
"I hope you will excuse me, Mrs. Tracy, for this morning call. I came—"
But she did not finish the sentence, for by this time Dolly had recovered herself a little, and throwing off her apron, began nervously:
"Not at all—not at all. I supposed you were some peddler or agent when I sent you to this door. They are the plague of my life, and think I'll buy everything and give to everything because Arthur did. I am doing my own work, you see. Come into the parlor;" and she led the way into the dark drawing-room, where the chairs and sofas were shrouded in white linen, and looked like so many ghosts in the dim, uncertain light.
But Dolly opened one of the windows, and pushing back the blinds, let in a flood of sunshine, so strong and bright that she at once closed the shutters, saying, apologetically, that she did not believe in fading the carpets, if they were not her own. Then she sat down upon an ottoman and faced her visitor, who was regarding her with a mixture of amusement and wonder.
Grace Atherton was an aristocrat to her very fingertips, and shrank from contact with anything vulgar and unsightly, and, to her mind, Mrs. Tracy represented both, and seemed sadly out of place in that handsome room, with her sleeves rolled up and the berry stains on her hands and face. Grace knew nothing by actual experience of canning berries, or aprons made of sacking, or of bare arms, except it were of an evening when they showed white and fair against her satin gown, with bands of gold and precious stones upon them, and she felt that there was an immeasurable distance between herself and this woman, whom she had come to see partly on business and partly because she thought she must call upon her for the sake of Arthur Tracy, who was one of her friends.
Her cook, who had been with her seven years, had gone to attend a sick mother, and had recommended as a fit person to take her place the woman who had just left Tracy Park.
"I do not like to take a servant without first knowing something of her from her last employer," she said; "and, if you don't mind, I should like to ask if Martha left you for anything very bad."
Mrs. Tracy colored scarlet, and for a moment was silent. She could not tell that fine lady in the white muslin dress with seas of lace and embroidery, that Martha had called her second classy, and stingy, and snooping, and mean, because she objected to the amount of coal burned, and bread thrown away, and time consumed at the table. All this she felt would scarcely interest a person like Mrs. Atherton, who might sympathize with Martha more than with herself, so she finally said:
"Martha was saucy to me, and on the whole it was better for them all to go, and so I am doing my own work."
"Doing your own work!" and Grace gave a little cry of surprise, while her shoulders shrugged meaningly, and made Mrs. Tracy almost as angry as she had been with Martha when she called her mean and stingy. "It cannot be possible that you cook, and wash, and iron, and do everything," Mrs. Atherton continued. "My dear Mrs. Tracy, you can never stand it in a house like this, and Mr. Arthur would not like it. Why, he kept as many as six servants, and sometimes more. Pray let me advise you, and commend to you a good girl, who lived with me three years, and can do everything, from dressing my hair to making blanc-mange. I only parted with her because she was sick, and now that she is well, her place is filled. Try her, and do not make a servant of yourself. It is not fitting that you should."
Grace was fond of giving advice, and had said more than she intended saying when she began, but, Mrs. Tracy, though annoyed, was not angry, and consented to receive the girl who had lived at Brier Hill three years, and who, she reflected, could be of use to her in many ways.
While sitting there in her soiled working dress talking to Mrs. Atherton, she had felt her inferiority more keenly than she had ever done before, while at the same time she was conscious that a new set of ideas and thoughts had taken possession of her, reawaking in her the germ of that ambition to be somebody which she had felt so often when a girl, and which now was to bud and blossom, and bear fruit a hundred fold. She would take the girl, and from her learn the ways of the world as practiced at Brier Hill. She would no longer wear sacking aprons, and open the door herself. She would be more like Grace Atherton, whom she watched admiringly as she went down the walk to the handsome carriage waiting for her, with driver and footman in tall hats and long coats on the box.
This was the beginning of the fine lady into which Dolly finally blossomed, and when that day Frank went home to his dinner he noticed something in her manner which he could not understand until she told him of Mrs. Atherton's call, and the plight in which that lady had found her.
"Served you right," Frank said, laughing till the tears ran. "You have no business to be digging round like a slave when we are able to have what we like. Arthur said we were to keep up the place as he had done, and that does not mean that you should be a scullion. No, Dolly; have all the girls you want, and hold up your head with the best of them. Get a new silk gown, and return Mrs. Atherton's call at once, and take a card and turn down one corner or the other, I don't know which, but this girl of hers can tell you. Pump her dry as a powder horn; find out what the quality do, and then do it, and don't bother about the expense. I am going in for a good time, and don't mean to work either. I told Colvin this morning that I