Page:Live and Let Live.djvu/31

 "She never hinted at any such thing."

"No, ma'am — but I somehow feel as if she had; and to them that has, Mrs. Ardley, it must be pretty hard to put up with what we have to gulp down, and say nothing about it."

"How ridiculous, Sophy! when everybody says servants have it all their own way nowadays."

"Do servants say so, Mrs. Ardley?"

"I am sure I don't know what they say." Sophy was not addicted to the classics, or she might have aptly reminded Mrs. Ardley of the lion's comment on the sculptor's giving the victory to man over him.

"I do remember," resumed Mrs. Ardley, recuringrecurring [sic] to the applicants, "thinking once while they were here that that poor body had something superior to her condition. If so, it must be shocking for her to go about so among strangers, looking up a place for that nice little girl - if she calls Monday morning, I wilt try and keep her, even if she has engaged a place." Mrs. Ardley felt a sympathy for a fallen possible lady, that she never would have dreamed of for a mere poor woman. When Mrs. Lee and Lucy again went on their way the lamps were lighting. There was still one application to be made, and, both wearied in body and spirit, they proceeded to the upper end of Greenwich-street, to a Mrs. Broadson's.

Mrs. Broadson asked innumerable questions, relevant and irrelevant. Where Mrs. Lee was born where she came from when she came to the city how long she had lived in New-York; how many children she had; what was her business; what was her husband's. "Strange," she said, "that