Three Lives | Page 6

the good Anna. Miss
Mathilda had to save her Anna from the many friends, who in the
kindly fashion of the poor, used up her savings and then gave her
promises in place of payments.
The good Anna had many curious friends that she had found in the
twenty years that she had lived in Bridgepoint, and Miss Mathilda
would often have to save her from them all.


Part II
THE LIFE OF THE GOOD ANNA
Anna Federner, this good Anna, was of solid lower middle-class south
german stock.
When she was seventeen years old she went to service in a bourgeois
family, in the large city near her native town, but she did not stay there
long. One day her mistress offered her maid--that was Anna--to a friend,
to see her home. Anna felt herself to be a servant, not a maid, and so
she promptly left the place.
Anna had always a firm old world sense of what was the right way for a
girl to do.
No argument could bring her to sit an evening in the empty parlour,
although the smell of paint when they were fixing up the kitchen made
her very sick, and tired as she always was, she never would sit down
during the long talks she held with Miss Mathilda. A girl was a girl and
should act always like a girl, both as to giving all respect and as to what
she had to eat.
A little time after she left this service, Anna and her mother made the
voyage to America. They came second-class, but it was for them a long

and dreary journey. The mother was already ill with consumption.
They landed in a pleasant town in the far South and there the mother
slowly died.
Anna was now alone and she made her way to Bridgepoint where an
older half brother was already settled. This brother was a heavy,
lumbering, good natured german man, full of the infirmity that comes
of excess of body.
He was a baker and married and fairly well to do.
Anna liked her brother well enough but was never in any way
dependent on him.
When she arrived in Bridgepoint, she took service with Miss Mary
Wadsmith.
Miss Mary Wadsmith was a large, fair, helpless woman, burdened with
the care of two young children. They had been left her by her brother
and his wife who had died within a few months of each other.
Anna soon had the household altogether in her charge.
Anna found her place with large, abundant women, for such were
always lazy, careless or all helpless, and so the burden of their lives
could fall on Anna, and give her just content. Anna's superiors must be
always these large helpless women, or be men, for none others could
give themselves to be made so comfortable and free.
Anna had no strong natural feeling to love children, as she had to love
cats and dogs, and a large mistress. She never became deeply fond of
Edgar and Jane Wadsmith. She naturally preferred the boy, for boys
love always better to be done for and made comfortable and full of
eating, while in the little girl she had to meet the feminine, the subtle
opposition, showing so early always in a young girl's nature.
For the summer, the Wadsmiths had a pleasant house out in the country,

and the winter months they spent in hotel apartments in the city.
Gradually it came to Anna to take the whole direction of their
movements, to make all the decisions as to their journeyings to and fro,
and for the arranging of the places where they were to live.
Anna had been with Miss Mary for three years, when little Jane began
to raise her strength in opposition. Jane was a neat, pleasant little girl,
pretty and sweet with a young girl's charm, and with two blonde braids
carefully plaited down her back.
Miss Mary, like her Anna, had no strong natural feeling to love
children, but she was fond of these two young ones of her blood, and
yielded docilely to the stronger power in the really pleasing little girl.
Anna always preferred the rougher handling of the boy, while Miss
Mary found the gentle force and the sweet domination of the girl to
please her better.
In a spring when all the preparations for the moving had been made,
Miss Mary and Jane went together to the country home, and Anna, after
finishing up the city matters was to follow them in a few days with
Edgar, whose vacation had not yet begun.
Many times during the preparations for this summer, Jane had met
Anna with sharp resistance, in opposition to her ways. It was simple for
little Jane to give