"I've had that percentage game handed out to me about a thousand times before," she remarked, "an' I believe in such money when I get it. Still, I don't mind seein' that five." Violet produced it, and saw it swiftly vanish down a black cotton stocking. "All right. Tell you what I'll do. Here's a woman down on Washington Square wants a maid to wait on table. Can you do it?" "I can try; but of course I've never done it before." "I'll rent you a couple of references in the name of Bella Nimick--that'll cost you two dollars more, an' I guess I'll have to trust you for it--an' the cook down there--she deals with us--she'll give you some pointers on the job. You'll find it a good place. They're old swells, an' the name's Chamberlin." Violet lost no time in seeking this new address. She found it to be a large brick house, with white marble steps, facing the leafy square from the north, and looking across the broad green lawn toward a church that towered into the blue skies by day and by night reached up toward Heaven with a fiery cross. The cook, to whom, through the areaway, she made her application, proved to be an ample Swedish woman, with a heart fashioned in true proportion to her body, and a round, placid face that spoke well for her mistress. That mistress, Violet was without delay informed, was an invalid, whose ills, if mostly fanciful, were at least fancied with a force sufficient to keep her in town and in the house all summer long. Her husband--she had remarried after a divorce--passed the warm months visiting more wealthy friends along the rocky Maine coast, and her son ran in to see her between such invitations to Newport and Narragansett as he could secure. A daughter by the second union, a girl of sixteen, remained to care for her mother, and this child and a professional nurse, whose long service made her almost a member of the family, completed the household. Violet was presented to Mrs. Chamberlin, a frail woman with a white, delicate face, lying on a couch in a darkened library, and, her references being casually read, was promptly engaged. She was to receive eighteen dollars a month for far lighter work than had been her portion under the sway of Mrs. Turner, and, as Bella Nimick, began at once to see that a better time was before her.