Waymark laughed.

“Oh, but you don’t understand.  I do so like cleanliness!  I have a sort of feeling when I’m washing anything, that I’m really doing good in the world, and the dazzling white of linen after I’d ironed it seemed to thank me for my work.”

“Yes, yes, I understand well enough,” said Waymark earnestly.

“For all that I couldn’t stay.  I was restless.  I had a foolish notion that I should like to be with a better kind of people again —­I mean people in a higher position.  I still kept answering advertisements for a lady’s maid’s place, and at last I got what I wanted.  Oh yes, I got it.”

She broke off’ laughing bitterly, and remained silent.  Waymark would not urge her to continue.  For a minute it seemed as if she would tell no more; she looked at her watch, and half arose.

“Oh, I may as well tell you all, now I’ve begun,” she said, falling back again in a careless way.  “You know what the end’s going to be; never mind, at all events I’ll try and make you understand how it came.

“The family I got into was a lady and her two grown-up daughters, and a son of about five-and-twenty.  They lived in a small house at Shepherd’s Bush.  My wages were very small, and I soon found out that they were a kind of people who keep up a great deal of show on very little means.  Of course I had to be let into all the secrets of their miserable shifts for dressing well on next to nothing at all, and they expected me—­mother and daughters—­to do the most wonderful and impossible things.  I had to turn old rags into smart new costumes, to trim worn-out hats into all manner of gaudy shapes, even to patch up boots in a way you couldn’t imagine.  And they used to send me with money to buy things they were ashamed to go and buy themselves; then, if I hadn’t laid out their few pence with marvellous result, they all but accused me of having used some of the money for myself.  I had fortunately learnt a great deal with the old lady in Tottenham, or I couldn’t have satisfied them for a day.  I’m sure I did what few people could have done, and for all that they treated me from almost the first very badly.  I had to be housemaid as well as lady’s maid; the slavery left me every night worn out with exhaustion.  And I hadn’t even enough to eat.  As time went on, they treated me worse and worse.  They spoke to me often in a way that made my heart boil, as if they were so many queens, and I was some poor mean wretch who was honoured by being allowed to toil for them.  Then they quarrelled among themselves unceasingly, and of course I had to bear all the bad temper.  I never saw people hate one another like those three did; the sisters even scratched each other’s faces in their fits of jealousy, and sometimes they both stormed at their mother till she went into hysterics, just because she couldn’t give them more money.  The only one in the house who ever spoke decently to me was the son—­Alfred Bolter, his name was.  I suppose I felt grateful to him.  Once or twice, when he met me on the stairs, he kissed me.  I was too miserable even to resent it.