Mrs. Brandon deposits her knitting on the table; rises slowly--old people's joints, like wooden dolls, decline to bend on short notice (it is a pity, is it not, that our machinery is not calculated to remain in a state of efficiency, even through our paltry seventy years?)--dismounts from the footstool, on which her feet have been perched, walks to the door, there stands, and, shaking her stiff, grey curls, speaks with trembling severity: "Esther, until you can discuss this subject with less irreverent violence, I must beg to decline any further conversation upon it." CHAPTER XXVI. "Wanted, by a young person, aged 17, a situation as companion to an invalid or elderly lady. Salary not so much an object as a comfortable home in a pious family. Address, A. B., Post Office, Naullan, N.W." This is the modest form in which Miss Craven's desire for work comes before the public. She had begged earnestly for the expunging of the "pious family." "It is not true, Mrs. Brandon," she says, with vexed tears in her eyes; "it is nothing to me whether they are pious or not--the salary is far the greatest object." "If it is, my dear, it ought not to be," answers promptly Mrs. Brandon, who, having paid for the insertion of the advertisement, thinks that she has a right to word it as she wishes. And now it has gone forth through the length and breadth of the civilized world, from the Arctic to the Antarctic Poles--has found its way into clubs and cafés, hotels and private houses, numerous as the sea-sand grains, in the overgrown advertisement sheet of the _Times_. To not one in ten thousand of that journal's millions of readers is it more interesting than any other announcement in the long columns of-- "Wanted, a cook." "Wanted, a cook." "Wanted, a good plain cook." "Wanted, a footman." "Wanted, a footman." A companionship, then, is what has been decided upon as the vocation to which Esther is best suited: it requires neither French nor German, neither astronomy nor the use of the globes: it demands only a patience out-Jobing Job, a meekness out-Mosesing Moses, a capacity for eating dirt greater than that of any _parvenu_ struggling into society, health and spirits more aggressively strong than a schoolboy's, and a pliability greater than an osier's. These qualities being supposed to be more quickly acquirable than music, drawing, and languages, Esther has decided upon entering on the office that will call for the exercise of them all.