This office consists of two rooms, the first filled with servants looking for mistresses, and the second with mistresses looking for servants. A Fräulein of vague age but determined bearing sits at a desk in the second room, and notes in a ledger the requirements of both parties. They are always the same: the would-be mistress, full of a hopefulness that crops up again and again to the end of her days, causing attributes like _fleissig, treu, ehrlich, anständig, arbeitslieb, kinderlieb_, to be written down together with her demands in cooking, starching, and ironing, and often adding the information that though the wages may appear small they are not really so, owing to the unusually superior quality of the treatment; and the would-be maid, briefer because without illusions, dictates her firm resolve to go nowhere where there is cooking, washing, or a baby. '_Gott, diese Mädchen_,' exclaimed a waiting lady to me as I arrived, hot and ruffled after my long tramp in the sun. I dropped into a chair beside her; and hot and ruffled as I was, she, who had been sitting there hours, was still more so. In her agitation she had cried out to the first human being at hand, the Fräulein at the desk having something too distinctly inhuman about her--strange as a result of her long and intimate intercourse with human beings--to be lightly applied to for sympathy. Then looking at me again she cried, 'Why, it is the good Rose-Marie!' And I saw she was an old friend of my step-mother's, Frau Meyer, the wife of one of the doctors at the Lunatic Asylum, who used to come in often while you were with us, and whenever she came in you went out. 'Not married yet?' she asked as we shook hands, smiling as though the joke were good. I smiled with an equal conviction of its goodness, and said I was not. 'Not even engaged?' 'Not even engaged,' said I, smiling more broadly, as if infinitely tickled. 'You must be quick,' said she. I admitted the necessity by a nod. 'You are twenty-six--I know your age because poor Emilie'--Emilie was my step-mother--'was married ten years, and when she married you were sixteen. Twenty-six is a great age for a girl. When I was your age I had already had four children. What do you think of that?' I didn't know what to think of it, so smiled vaguely, and turning to the waiting machine at the desk began my list. 'Hard-working, clean, honest--' 'Yes, yes, if we could but find such treasures,' interrupted Frau Meyer with a reverberating sigh. 'Here am I engaged to give the first coffee-party of the season--' 'What, in summer?' 'It is not summer in September. If the weather chooses to pretend it is I cannot help it. It is autumn, and I will no longer endure the want of social gatherings. Invariably I find the time between the last Coffee of spring and the first of autumn almost unendurable. What do you do, Rose-Marie, up there on that horrible mountain of yours, to pass the time?'