Turning the conversation I soon learned that my companion was the widow of a well-known college professor. She had been “enticed,” she said, by an advertisement similar to the one I had answered.
“I did try to be careful,” she assured me, “because giving up the little I had in the way of a home meant so much to me. Once before I had been tricked by a woman. This time, to make sure that everything was all right, I came out to Rodman Hall and talked with Mrs. Howard. The place is so beautiful and that woman talked so fair I felt sure that I had found a comfortable home with congenial work for the balance of my life.” She shook her head, was silent for a few seconds, then added: “If I could I would leave to-morrow. As it is I’ve just got to stick it out until I get money enough to pay my way back to the West to my people.”
“But the other women!” I remonstrated, convinced that the woman was exaggerating conditions. “Surely refined, educated women——”
“Educated!” she scoffed. “Excepting Miss —— (naming the woman with whom I had talked) I don’t believe a one of them can do more than write her name. They are all foreigners. Do you know who she is?”
Admitting unwillingly that this woman had told me of having been the secretary of a man mixed up in some financial scandal, I added:
“But surely you don’t imagine that Mrs. Howard knows.”
“Don’t imagine she knows! I know she knows,” the clergyman’s widow declared. “That woman is one of Mrs. Howard’s standbys. Being an educated woman and fairly presentable, Mrs. Howard pushes her forward on any and all occasions. Did Mrs. Howard introduce you to any of the nurses?”
“Of course not. She wants to keep up as long as possible her idea about the children being cared for by gentlewomen!” The scorn with which she pronounced gentlewomen! “The nurses are regular Irish biddies, every one of them.”
Much to my surprise on returning from the village a few minutes before nine I discovered that the sheets had been taken off my bed. They were not in the room. As everybody in the house appeared to be asleep and I did not care to awaken them, sleeping without sheets was my only alternative. The mattress did not look any too fresh, so I covered it with my two extra nighties.