Three Lives | Page 3

herself to her task, "but you
must remember, Molly, she means it for your good and she is really
very kind to you."
"I don't want her kindness," Molly cried, "I wish you would tell me
what to do, Miss Mathilda, and then I would be all right. I hate Miss
Annie."
"This will never do Molly," Miss Mathilda said sternly, in her deepest,
firmest tones, "Anna is the head of the kitchen and you must either
obey her or leave."
"I don't want to leave you," whimpered melancholy Molly. "Well

Molly then try and do better," answered Miss Mathilda, keeping a good
stern front, and backing quickly from the kitchen.
"Oh! Oh!" groaned Miss Mathilda, as she went back up the stairs.
Miss Mathilda's attempt to make peace between the constantly
contending women in the kitchen had no real effect. They were very
soon as bitter as before.
At last it was decided that Molly was to go away. Molly went away to
work in a factory in the town, and she went to live with an old woman
in the slums, a very bad old woman Anna said.
Anna was never easy in her mind about the fate of Molly. Sometimes
she would see or hear of her. Molly was not well, her cough was worse,
and the old woman really was a bad one.
After a year of this unwholesome life, Molly was completely broken
down. Anna then again took her in charge. She brought her from her
work and from the woman where she lived, and put her in a hospital to
stay till she was well. She found a place for her as nursemaid to a little
girl out in the country, and Molly was at last established and content.
Molly had had, at first, no regular successor. In a few months it was
going to be the summer and Miss Mathilda would be gone away, and
old Katie would do very well to come in every day and help Anna with
her work.
Old Katy was a heavy, ugly, short and rough old german woman, with
a strange distorted german-english all her own. Anna was worn out
now with her attempt to make the younger generation do all that it
should and rough old Katy never answered back, and never wanted her
own way. No scolding or abuse could make its mark on her uncouth
and aged peasant hide. She said her "Yes, Miss Annie," when an
answer had to come, and that was always all that she could say.
"Old Katy is just a rough old woman, Miss Mathilda," Anna said, "but I
think I keep her here with me. She can work and she don't give me

trouble like I had with Molly all the time."
Anna always had a humorous sense from this old Katy's twisted
peasant english, from the roughness on her tongue of buzzing s's and
from the queer ways of her brutish servile humor. Anna could not let
old Katy serve at table--old Katy was too coarsely made from natural
earth for that--and so Anna had all this to do herself and that she never
liked, but even then this simple rough old creature was pleasanter to her
than any of the upstart young.
Life went on very smoothly now in these few months before the
summer came. Miss Mathilda every summer went away across the
ocean to be gone for several months. When she went away this summer
old Katy was so sorry, and on the day that Miss Mathilda went, old
Katy cried hard for many hours. An earthy, uncouth, servile peasant
creature old Katy surely was. She stood there on the white stone steps
of the little red brick house, with her bony, square dull head with its
thin, tanned, toughened skin and its sparse and kinky grizzled hair, and
her strong, squat figure a little overmade on the right side, clothed in
her blue striped cotton dress, all clean and always washed but rough
and harsh to see--and she stayed there on the steps till Anna brought her
in, blubbering, her apron to her face, and making queer guttural broken
moans.
When Miss Mathilda early in the fall came to her house again old Katy
was not there.
"I never thought old Katy would act so Miss Mathilda," Anna said,
"when she was so sorry when you went away, and I gave her full wages
all the summer, but they are all alike Miss Mathilda, there isn't one of
them that's fit to trust. You know how Katy said she liked you, Miss
Mathilda, and went on about it when you went away and then she was
so good and worked all right until the middle of the summer, when I
got sick, and then she