Beauty, Personal -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Venus (Planet) -- Fiction
His eyebrows elevated half an inch. "There is a young woman _employed_
here," he said. "I regret to say that this is her night off, and she is
not here."
"Employed," I said to Harry. "She must have hired as a private
secretary or something."
I doubt if the stiff in livery had smiled in years. He shouldn't have
tried it. It almost cost him his teeth. "Hardly anything so grand as
that," he said. "The girl is Mrs. Campbell's personal maid."
Harry was silent for a moment. I waited for him to speak. We looked at
each other.
"Maybe we ought to talk to this Althea Campbell," I suggested.
The woman was nearer to forty than thirty, and she could have been
handsome once. Even now her shape wouldn't have been bad if she'd taken
off forty pounds. The poundage was unnatural and flabby, and her skin
was blotched and unpleasant. She was a faded, natural blonde, I would
say, but her hair was red now.
Harry was always polite. He went forward and introduced us. She was
wearing a silk wrapper a couple of sizes too small, and she didn't get
up to greet us.
Still, she didn't seem to be displeased by an unexpected visit by two
males at 10:00 p.m. The look she gave Harry was as if she might eat
him. Harry never seemed to notice how it was with women when he came
into a room, but I could see it, raw and naked, on her face.
She was a widow, and Sukey had been working for her a week. Harry said
he knew of a job in the Company office that he could get for Sukey, and
he asked Mrs. Campbell to let her go, without telling her we'd been
there.
Mrs. Campbell's face took on a little color, making it appear more
mottled than ever. And her voice was too shrill to be comfortable. She
said that maids were very difficult to find this day and time, and that
if Sukey didn't mind it, we shouldn't mind either. She wouldn't give
her up.
"Let's wait and see what Sukey has to say about it," I suggested.
Harry shook his head. "We can't do that. She mustn't know we've been
here, Chuck."
"Why? Servants may be out of date, but there's nothing disgraceful
about honest labor."
"Of course not," Harry said. "But to Sukey it must be embarrassing.
That's why she didn't let me know what she was doing, don't you see? It
must have been that."
Well, it was logical enough. And that was Harry for you. Always
thinking first of Sukey's feelings, whereas I would probably have
turned her across my knee. But we had to do something.
We were going to be in port for three weeks, and Harry made an
appointment to come back the following Thursday, when Sukey was away
from the house, and try to reason once more with Althea Campbell.
Harry went back the next week, and the week after that, and he wasn't
having any luck, but he said that at least he could make sure that
Sukey was still all right.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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