She was chiefly to get an English maid, if at all possible, for the qualifications would more or less naturally follow from her nationality.  There proved to be no English maid, but there was a Swedish one who had received a rigid training in an English family living on the Continent, and had come immediately from that service to seek her first place in America.  The manager of the office pronounced her character, as set down in writing, faultless, and Mrs. Lander engaged her.  “You want to look afta this young lady,” she said, indicating Clementina.  “I can look afta myself,” but Ellida took charge of them both on the train out from Boston with prompt intelligence.

“We got to get used to it, I guess,” Mrs. Lander confided at the first chance of whispering to Clementina.

Within a month after washing the faces and combing the hair of all her brothers and sisters who would suffer it at her hands, Clementina’s own head was under the brush of a lady’s maid, who was of as great a discreetness in her own way as Clementina herself.  She supplied the defects of Mrs. Lander’s elementary habits by simply asking if she should get this thing and that thing for the toilet, without criticising its absence,—­and then asking whether she should get the same things for her young lady.  She appeared to let Mrs. Lander decide between having her brushes in ivory or silver, but there was really no choice for her, and they came in silver.  She knew not only her own place, but the places of her two ladies, and she presently had them in such training that they were as proficient in what they might and might not do for themselves and for each other, as if making these distinctions were the custom of their lives.

Their hearts would both have gone out to Ellida, but Ellida kept them at a distance with the smooth respectfulness of the iron hand in the glove of velvet; and Clementina first learned from her to imagine the impassable gulf between mistress and maid.

At the end of her month she gave them, out of a clear sky, a week’s warning.  She professed no grievance, and was not moved by Mrs. Lander’s appeal to say what wages she wanted.  She would only say that she was going to take a place an Commonwealth Avenue, where a friend of hers was living, and when the week was up, she went, and left her late mistresses feeling rather blank.  “I presume we shall have to get anotha,” said Mrs. Lander.

“Oh, not right away!” Clementina pleaded.

“Well, not right away,” Mrs. Lander assented; and provisionally they each took the other into her keeping, and were much freer and happier together.

Soon after Clementina was startled one morning, as she was going in to breakfast, by seeing Mr. Fane at the clerk’s desk.  He did not see her; he was looking down at the hotel register, to compute the bill of a departing guest; but when she passed out she found him watching for her, with some letters.