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