yourself useful to a lot of helpless creatures who will pay you a trifle
for looking after them and the affairs they are too lazy or too foolish
to manage for themselves. You might get on to one of the second-class
fashion-papers to answer ridiculous questions about house-keeping or
wall-papers or freckles. You know the kind of thing I mean. You might
write notes or do accounts and shopping for some lazy woman. You are a
practical, honest creature, and you have good manners. I have often
thought that you had just the kind of commonplace gifts that a host of
commonplace people want to find at their service. An old servant of mine
who lives in Mortimer Street would probably give you cheap, decent
lodgings, and behave well to you for my sake. She has reason to be fond
of me. Tell her I sent you to her, and that she must take you in for ten
shillings a week.

Emily wept for gratitude, and ever afterward enthroned old Mrs. Maytham
on an altar as a princely and sainted benefactor, though after she had
invested her legacy she got only twenty pounds a year from it.

"It was so _kind_ of her," she used to say with heartfelt humbleness of
spirit. "I never _dreamed_ of her doing such a generous thing. I hadn't
a _shadow_ of a claim upon her--not a _shadow_." It was her way to
express her honest emotions with emphasis which italicised, as it were,
her outpourings of pleasure or appreciation.

She returned to London and presented herself to the ex-serving-woman.
Mrs. Cupp had indeed reason to remember her mistress gratefully. At a
time when youth and indiscreet affection had betrayed her disastrously,
she had been saved from open disgrace and taken care of by Mrs. Maytham.

The old lady, who had then been a vigorous, sharp-tongued, middle-aged