That is to say, that this girl was at the very top of her profession and received two pounds ten shillings a week. Dozens of girls envied her, she was more highly paid than most of the men clerks in the city. She knew herself to be a very fortunate girl. She gave high technical ability, a good intelligence, unceasing, unwearying and most loyal service for fifty shillings a week.
Each year she had a holiday of fourteen days, when she clubbed with some other girls and they all went to some farmhouse in the country, or even for a cheap excursion abroad, with everything calculated to the last shilling. This girl did all this, dressed like a lady, had a little home of her own with Rita, preserved her dignity and independence, and sent many a small postal order to help the poor curate's wife, her mother, with the hungry brood of younger ones. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison in Lancashire spoke of their eldest daughter with pride. She had "her flat in town." She was "doing extraordinarily well"; "Sister Ethel" was a fairy godmother to her little brothers and sisters.
She was a good girl, good and happy. The graces were denied her; she had made all sweet virtues her own. No man wooed her, no man looked twice at her. She had no religious ecstasies, and--instead of a theatre where one had to pay--asked no thrills from sensuous ceremonial. She simply went to the nearest church and said her prayers.
It is the shame of most of us that when we meet such women as these, we pass them by with a kindly laugh or a patronising word. Men and women of the world prefer more decorative folk. They like to watch holiness in a picturesque setting, Elizabeth of Hungary washing the beggar's feet upon the palace steps. . . .
A little worker-bee saint, making a milk pudding for a sick washerwoman on a gas-stove in a flat--that comes rather too close home, does it not?
The light was really fading now, and Ethel put down her sewing, rose from her basket-work chair, and lit the gas.
It was an incandescent burner, hanging from the centre of the ceiling, and the girls' living room was revealed.
It was a very simple, comely, makeshift little home.
On one side of the fireplace--now filled with a brown and gasping harts-tongue fern in an earthen pot--was Ethel's bookshelf.