Page:Frank Stockton - Rudder Grange.djvu/38

Rh "If I were in your place," said he, "I would get her a servant."

"If you were in my place," I replied, somewhat cuttingly, "you would probably suggest a lot of little things which would make everything very easy for her." "I'd try to," he answered, without getting in the least angry.

Although I felt annoyed that he had suggested it, still I made up my mind that Euphemia must have a servant.

She agreed quite readily when I proposed the plan, and she urged me to go and see the carpenter that very day, and get him to come and partition off a little room for the girl.

It was some time, of course, before the room was made (for whoever heard of a carpenter coming at the very time he was wanted?), and when it was finished, Euphemia occupied all her spare moments in getting it in nice order for the servant when she should come. I thought she was taking too much trouble, but she had her own ideas about such things.

"If a girl is lodged like a pig, you must expect her to behave like a pig, and I don't want that kind."

So she put up pretty curtains at the girl's window, and, with a box that she stood on end, and some old muslin and a lot of tacks, she made a toilet table so neat and convenient that I thought she ought to take it into our room and give the servant our washstand.

But all this time we had no girl, and as I had made up my mind about the matter, I naturally grew impatient, and at last I determined to go and get a girl myself. So, one day at lunch-time, I went to an intelligence office in the city. There I found a large room on the