Faith Gartneys Girlhood | Page 5

Aunt Henderson, taking a large towel from the girl's arm as she set down her tub upon the sideboard. "You go and find something else to do."
Wherever she might be--to be sure, her round of visiting was not a large one--Aunt Henderson never let anyone else wash up breakfast cups.
This quiet arming of herself, with mop and towel, stirred up everybody else to duty. Her niece-in-law laughed, withdrew her feet from the comfortable fender, and departed to the kitchen to give her household orders for the day. Faith removed cups, glasses, forks, and spoons from the table to the sideboard, while the maid, returning with a tray, carried off to the lower regions the larger dishes.
"I haven't told you yet, Elizabeth, what I came to town for," said Aunt Faith, when Mrs. Gartney came back into the breakfast room. "I'm going to hunt up a girl."
"A girl, aunt! Why, what has become of Prudence?"
"Mrs. Pelatiah Trowe. That's what's become of her. More fool she."
"But why in the world do you come to the city for a servant? It's the worst possible place. Nineteen out of twenty are utterly good for nothing."
"I'm going to look out for the twentieth."
"But aren't there girls enough in Kinnicutt who would be glad to step in Prue's place?"
"Of course there are. But they're all well enough off where they are. When I have a chance to give away, I want to give it to somebody that needs it."
"I'm afraid you'll hardly find any efficient girl who will appreciate the chance of going twenty miles into the country."
"I don't want an efficient girl. I'm efficient myself, and that's enough."
"Going to train another, at your time of life, aunt?" asked Mrs. Gartney, in surprise.
"I suppose I must either train a girl, or let her train me; and, at my time of life, I don't feel to stand in need of that."
"How shall I go to work to inquire?" resumed Aunt Henderson, after a pause.
"Well, there are the Homes, and the Offices, and the Ministers at Large. At a Home, they would probably recommend you somebody they've made up their minds to put out to service, and she might or might not be such as would suit you. Then at the Offices, you'll see all sorts, and mostly poor ones."
"I'll try an Office, first," interrupted Miss Henderson. "I want to see all sorts. Faith, you'll go with me, by and by, won't you, and help me find the way?"
Faith, seated at a little writing table at the farther end of the room, busied in copying into her album, in a clear, neat, but rather stiff schoolgirl's hand, the oracle of the night before, did not at once notice that she was addressed.
"Faith, child! don't you hear?"
"Oh, yes, aunt. What is it?"
"I want you to go to a what-d'ye-call-it office with me, to-day."
"An intelligence office," explained her mother. "Aunt Faith wants to find a girl."
"'Lucus a non lucendo,'" quoted Faith, rather wittily, from her little stock of Latin. "Stupidity offices, I should call them, from the specimens they send out."
"Hold your tongue, chit! Don't talk Latin to me!" growled Aunt Henderson.
"What are you writing?" she asked, shortly after, when Mrs. Gartney had again left her and Faith to each other. "Letters, or Latin?"
Faith colored, and laughed.
"Only a fortune that was told me last night," she replied.
"Oh! 'A little husband,' I suppose, 'no bigger than my thumb; put him in a pint pot, and there bid him drum.'"
"No," said Faith, half seriously, and half teased out of her seriousness. "It's nothing of that sort. At least," she added, glancing over the lines again, "I don't think it means anything like that."
And Faith laid down the book, and went upstairs for a word with her mother.
Aunt Henderson, who had been brought up in times when all the doings of young girls were strictly supervised, and who had no high-flown scruples, because she had no mean motives, deliberately walked over and fetched the elegant little volume from the table, reseated herself in her armchair--felt for her glasses, and set them carefully upon her nose--and, as her grandniece returned, was just finishing her perusal of the freshly inscribed lines.
"Humph! A good fortune. Only you've got to earn it."
"Yes," said Faith, quite gravely. "And I don't see how. There doesn't seem to be much that I can do."
"Just take hold of the first thing that comes in your way. If the Lord's got anything bigger to give you, he'll see to it. There's your mother's mending basket brimful of stockings."
Faith couldn't help laughing. Presently she grew grave again.
"Aunt Henderson," said she, abruptly, "I wish something would happen to me. I get tired of living sometimes. Things don't seem worth while."
Aunt Henderson bent her head slightly, and opened her eyes wide over the tops of