For the third time since we had taken our chambers, I was servantless, and I could not summon up courage to face for the third time the scorn which the simple request for a "general" meets in the English Registry Office. That was what sent me to try my luck at a French _Bureau_ in Soho, where, I was given to understand, it was possible to inquire for, and actually obtain, a good _bonne a tout faire_ and escape without insult. Louise was announced one dull November morning, a few days later. I found her waiting for me in our little hall,--a woman of about forty, short, plump, with black eyes, blacker hair, and an enchanting smile. But the powder on her face and the sham diamonds in her ears seemed to hang out danger signals, and my first impulse was to show her the door. It was something familiar in the face under the powder, above all in the voice when she spoke, that made me hesitate. "Provencale?" I asked. "Yes, from Marseilles," she answered, and I showed her instead into my room. I had often been "down there" where the sun shines and skies are blue, and her Provencal accent came like a breath from the south through the gloom of the London fog, bringing it all back to me,--the blinding white roads, the gray hills sweet with thyme and lavender, the towns with their "antiquities," the little shining white villages,--M. Bernard's at Martigues, and his dining-room, and the Marseillais who crowded it on a Sunday morning, and the gaiety and the laughter, and Desire in his white apron, and the great bowls of _bouillabaisse_.... It was she who recalled me to the business of the moment. Her name was Louise Sorel, she said; she could clean, wash, play the lady's maid, sew, market, cook--but cook! _Te--au mouins_, she would show _Madame_; and, as she said it, she smiled. I have never seen such perfect teeth in woman or child; you knew at a glance that she must have been a radiant beauty in her youth. A Provencal accent, an enchanting smile, and the remains of beauty, however, are not precisely what you engage a servant for; and, with a sudden access of common sense, I asked for references. Surely, _Madame_ would not ask the impossible, she said reproachfully. She had but arrived in London, she had never gone as _bonne_ anywhere; how, then, could she give references? She needed the work and was willing to do it: was not that sufficient? I got out of it meanly by telling her I would think it over. At that she smiled again,--really, her smile on a November day almost warranted the risk. I meant to take her; she knew; _Madame_ was kind.