"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.
"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?"
"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."