Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/188

 did not make quite the baronial impression which might have been expected. Mary William, especially when performing the arduous duties of maid-of-all-work minus the wages, used to murmur within herself against the hall, and against all the spacious rooms, which seemed to have taken their cue from it. For she reflected that every superfluous square yard of floor meant just so much more carpet to sweep; that every inch of wood-work offered just so much more ofa resting-place for dust. Mary William was of the opinion that her youth had been deliberately sacrificed to the house, and pre-eminently to the pillared hall, and she secretly rebelled against it with all her might and main. Not work for her living, indeed? How many a time had the one "girl" of the establishment been dismissed on some slight pretext! How many a time had her "place" remained vacant, and while Mrs. William Pratt sat in the parlor or lingered among the baronial pillars, complaining to visitors of the inferiority and scarcity of servants, the unfortunate Mary William had stood scorching her face over the kitchen stove, or cleaning the set of elaborate repoussé silver, which lent such an air of distinction to their sideboard.

But Mary William was a young person of much determination and rather unusual intelligence, and while her hands grew rough and her temper just a little sharpened in the drudgery of her daily life, she saw to it that no rust should