It can easily be imagined that gossip of this kind was extremely interesting to a person in my position, anxious to learn all I could regarding the lay of the land which I had come to inhabit. The communicativeness of my new associates, and the facility with which I was getting on with them at starting, reassured me greatly. I began to wonder at my former qualms, lest in descending to a lower social grade I should find things to put up with that were distasteful and unpleasant. Entering service was, after all, no such formidable ordeal as I had imagined; there was nothing that I should not quickly grow accustomed to in my unfamiliar surroundings; nothing to shock the prejudices or fastidiousness of any reasonable person; no reason whatever why I should not be able to fraternise, and make myself at home, just as well in that class of life as in any other. Alas for these _couleur de rose_ anticipations of mine! They were destined to be of but very brief duration, and were soon ruthlessly destroyed by the following most vexatious occurrence. As there is no accounting for tastes, and as even the ugliest of women need not despair of meeting with some man in whose eyes she will appear beautiful, or nice-looking at the very least, therefore I might obviously have foreseen the possibility of my encountering some male fellow-servant or other who would consider me sufficiently attractive to flirt with. Of course, I ought to have taken this into my calculations when I was contemplating the various chances and events to which I should be liable on entering service. But it was a contingency which, somehow or other, never once occurred to me; I suppose I was too destitute of vanity about my own charms to think of it. Now amongst my new companions was Lord Mervyn's valet, Perkins, a pale-faced, sandy-haired, thick-lipped, abominably-scented man, who wore flowing whiskers of inordinate length which he greatly cherished; who believed himself to be universally acceptable to the weaker sex, and who was conceited, cowardly, and revengeful. As bad luck would have it, I happened to take his fancy at first sight; and it all of a sudden dawned upon me, to my amazement and dismay, that he was actually making me the object of very marked and unmistakable attentions. Scandalised at the notion of a man-servant taking the liberty to raise his eyes to a lady, I could hardly trust to the evidence of my own senses at first. But then the matter seemed less unlikely when I remembered that he had not a suspicion of there being any inequality of rank between him and me, and that, as far as that went, I was in his eyes just the same as any other maid in the house.