superiority that teachers assume among their pupils until it is second nature, Mrs. Arnold has that air to a degree that, I’m ashamed to admit, I find insufferable.
“Like her mother, she is curious about everything and everybody in the neighborhood. I heard more gossip, disguised as friendly criticism, during luncheon time than I’ve ever heard in all my life before, even in Reading.
“I got an impression, vague to be sure, that Mr. Differdale’s mother was jealous of my advantage in being his assistant, and in thus being admitted to the knowledge of his work. She told me, with rather a dry air, that she had never been invited to set foot within the precinets guarded by that ten-foot wall that surrounds the house where her only son lives and works. The thought that I had already been admitted there was only too evidently distasteful to her, and I felt that her disposition to be friendly was motivated by her belief that it would give her later opportunities to satisfy her curiosity, when more confidential relations should have been established between us.
“There are two Arnold children, disagreeable little brats of nine and eleven respectively. Their names are Alice and Minna. I have rarely had the misfortune to meet such malicious children. I can well believe their mother’s complaint that they are always quarreling with other children on that street, but I do not believe it is the others who are at fault, as Mrs. Arnold declares. Their mother says she cannot make them obey her because they are so high-spirited. If this is the actual reason, then deliver me from high-spirited children for the rest of my life! The neighbors appear to share my dislike, for the two children seem extremely unpopular.
“Mrs. Differdale asked if her son had provided a chaperon for me and seemed very much put out at what she called his lack of consideration, assuring me that I would undoubtedly find myself very much talked about unless I insisted upon the presence in my employer’s house of an older woman whose presence would protect me. I inquired innocently enough if her son had such a bad reputation, and she was quite wild at the insinuation, but kept returning to her observation that people in Meadowlawn were very gossipy.”
In a previous letter Portia described the great square building of two stories that contained the immense laboratory and a roomy library where thousands of ancient and modern volumes were shelved. A dining room furnished in modern fashion, an up-to-date kitchen, and the sleeping quarters of Mr. Differdale, Portia, and Fu Sing, took up the rest of the building. Laboratory, dining room and Fu’s kitchen and bedroom were on the ground floor, the library and other sleeping quarters and private bathrooms on the second floor.
Most of Portia’s work when she first went there was the indexing for easier reference of the thousands of books in the library. The letter from which I quoted at length about Mr. Differdale’s family was written about a month after Portia left Reading. From that time on her work must have absorbed her to the exclusion of everything else, for letters became more and more infrequent. ‘She only things I could glean from these brief messages were that her employer was a great and noble benefactor of humanity; that she had hurt her knee when racing with the wolfhounds one evening and a Mr. Owen Edwardes (who had a real estate office on the boulevard) had escorted her home, and that the dogs had “behaved like angels although he was a complete stranger to them”; that Mr. Owen Edwardes had motored her one evening to Pleasure Beach, an amuse-
