Once we were established, we saw her less often. Her daily masterpiece was finished in the morning before we were up, and at all times she effaced herself with the respect she owed to tenants of a house in which she was the servant. If we did meet her she acknowledged our greeting with ostentatious humility, for she clung with as little shame to servility as to cleanliness; servility was also a part of the business of a housekeeper, just as elegance was the mark of _the_ profession which her daughter graced, and the shame would have been not to be as servile as the position demanded. This daughter was in every way an elegant person, dressing with a fidelity to fashion which I could not hope to emulate, and with the help of a fashionable dressmaker whom I could not afford to pay. She was "resting" from the time we came into the house until her mother left it, but if in _the_ profession it is a misfortune to be out of work, it is a crime to look it, and her appearance and manner gave no hint of unemployment. In an emergency she would bring us up a message or a letter, but her civility had none of her mother's obsequiousness; it was a condescension, and she made us feel the honor she conferred upon the house by living in it. She was engaged to be married to a stage manager who for the moment seemed to be without a stage to manage, for he spent his evenings with her in the Housekeeper's little sitting-room, where photographs of actors and actresses, each with its sprawling autograph, covered the walls, crowded the mantelpiece, and littered the table. I think the Housekeeper could have asked for nothing better than that they should both continue to "rest," not so much because it gave her the pleasure of their society as because it was a protection to the house to have a man about after dark until the street door was closed at eleven. Had it come to a question between the house and her daughter, the daughter would not have had a chance.