"One dollar, lady," came the voice of her driver. Daisy faced about. The
features, as a whole, of the chauffeur held only polite formality; but
eye-corner and mouth-corner still twinkled and twitched.
"What's that?" she said.
"Your fare--one dollar."
"Oh!" Daisy's hand went to the bosom of her blouse, slipped in--and was
presently withdrawn, somewhat blankly. She had left the purse on the
dresser at the hotel. No use going back now. A little shrug dismissed
the matter. That was Daisy's way with vicissitudes.
"Nothin' doin', huh?" the chauffeur's voice was humorously sharp, "Well,
don't start makin' excuses. It won't," the young man glanced up at the
mighty and singular front of the Harrison house, "it won't be hard to
find you, as long as you're at this place. I'll come back for it."
Daisy dimpled and turned off again.
"Say," commented the taxi-driver, "you better not go in th' front door."
Daisy was walking straight up to the front steps.
"Excuse me for buttin' in," her adviser continued, "but the front door
is only for the people that lives here, or their dolled-up guests. I'm
only tellin' you for your own good. If you was to go up there and ring
the front door bell, like you was headed to do, they'd know you was a
green hand, see, and most likely you wouldn't get the job you're after."
Daisy hadn't told her conductor she was after any job. He seemed to have
a way of knowing things. She put up her chin a little, and did not look
back, but thought it best to follow his advice. Without waiting to see
whether she took it or not, he spun away down the other arm of the
horseshoe-shaped drive, on his return to the street.
Passing down a walk at the side of the house, Daisy saw a girl looking
out through a latticed gate. Evidently the sylph had phoned her
housemaid friend to be "on the lookout".
"I thort you were never a-comin', I did," said the housemaid, who was a
thin, white, dissatisfied figure, with a larynx almost as prominent as
the "Adam's-apple" of a lean man. Alice was one who had worn herself out
with the effort, first to avoid doing any more than the barely
necessary, and second, to do this as perfunctorily as she could--which
was very perfunctorily. Daisy had expected, somehow, to find her just as
she was--that is to say, homelier than the skittish sylph, because
otherwise she could not have been a friend of the latter.
Brisking up to the girl, diplomatically sociable, Daisy said: "I came as
soon's I could. It's a long way."
"Come in," said Alice, in her querulous voice. Daisy followed the
present incumbent of the position that was to be hers, into the Harrison
kitchen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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