“Madam,” she said to my wife, “I have known many housemaids, but never one like this.  She is, I assure you, Madam, absolutely IT.”

So we engaged her; and ere long I came to hate her with a hatred such as I trust I shall never again cherish for any human being.

In almost every respect she proved perfection.  She was honest, she was quick, she was clean; she loved darning my socks and ironing my handkerchiefs; she never sulked, she never smashed, her hair never wisped (a thing I loathe in housemaids).  In one point only she failed, failed more completely than any servant I have ever known.  She would not make my shaving-water really hot.

Cursed by nature with an iron-filings beard and a delicate tender skin, I was a man for whom it was impossible to shave with comfort in anything but absolutely boiling water.  Yet morning after morning I sprang from my bed to find the contents of my jug just a little over or under the tepid mark.  There was no question of re-heating the water on the gas stove, for I never allowed myself more than the very minimum of time for dressing, swallowing my breakfast and catching my train.  It was torture.

I spoke to Emily about it, mildly at first, more forcibly as the weeks wore on, passionately at last.  She apologised, she sighed, she wrung her hands.  Once she wept—­shed hot scalding tears, tears I could gladly have shaved in had they fallen half-an-hour earlier.  But it made no difference; next morning my water was as chill as ever.  I could not understand it.  Every day my wrath grew blacker, my reproaches more vehement.

Finally an hour came when I said to my wife, “One of two things must happen.  Either that girl goes or I grow a beard.”

Mildred shook her head.  “We can’t possibly part with her.  We should never get another servant like her.”

“Very well,” I said.

On the morrow I started for my annual holiday, alone.  It was late summer.  I journeyed into the wilds of Wiltshire.  I took two rooms in an isolated cottage, and on the first night of my stay, before getting into bed, I threw my looking-glass out of the window.  Next morning I began.  Day by day I tramped the surrounding country, avoiding all intercourse with humanity, and day by day my beard grew.

I could feel it growing, and the first scrubbiness of it filled me with rage.  But as time slipped by it became softer and more pliable, and ceased to irritate me.  Freed, too, from the agony of shaving, I soon found myself eating my breakfast in a more equable frame of mind than I had enjoyed for years.  I began also to notice in my walks all sorts of things that had not struck me at first—­the lark a-twitter in the blue, the good smell of wet earth after rain, the pale gold of ripening wheat.  And at last, before ever I saw it, very gradually I came to love my beard, to love the warm comfort and cosiness of it, and to wonder half timidly what it looked like.