Diantha studied and observed. They brought her their poor confidences,
painfully similar. Always poverty--or they would not be there. Always
ignorance, or they would not stay there. Then either incompetence in
the work, or inability to hold their little earnings--or both; and
further the Tale of the Other Side--the exactions and restrictions of
the untrained mistresses they served; cases of withheld wages; cases of
endless requirements; cases of most arbitrary interference with their
receiving friends and "followers," or going out; and cases, common
enough to be horrible, of insult they could only escape by leaving.
"It's no wages, of course--and no recommendation, when you leave like
that--but what else can a girl do, if she's honest?"
So Diantha learned, made friends and laid broad foundations.
The excellence of her cocking was known to many, thanks to the weekly
"entertainments." No one refused. No one regretted acceptance. Never
had Mrs. Porne enjoyed such a sense of social importance.
All the people she ever knew called on her afresh, and people she never
knew called on her even more freshly. Not that she was directly
responsible for it. She had not triumphed cruelly over her less happy
friends; nor had she cried aloud on the street corners concerning her
good fortune. It was not her fault, nor, in truth anyone's. But in a
community where the "servant question" is even more vexed than in the
country at large, where the local product is quite unequal to the
demand, and where distance makes importation an expensive matter, the
fact of one woman's having, as it appeared, settled this vexed question,
was enough to give her prominence.
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