Page:Far from the Maddening Girls.djvu/63

 is to macaroni — smaller, that is, and infinitely more difficult to manipulate. As everything breakable came down from town packed in it, life became a mere struggle to keep it from going up my sleeves and down my neck, and I grew to fear and hate it, to tremble at sight of it, to flee from it when possible, as if it were a pest. I am convinced that hope was the only thing in Pandora’s box — but the hope was packed in excelsior.

Before now I had an offset to Miss Berrith in the person of Mrs. Sarah Galvin, a widow on the perfectly safe side of fifty, who was to serve me thenceforward in the combined capacities of housekeeper, cook, and Sally-de-chambre. She had already taken up her abode in my bungalow, where she was existing, in some precarious fashion of her own, on tea and chronic melancholy until such time as things should be in running order. She was the sort of woman you would not know a second time if you met her in a pint-pot. She had