York, Jan. 10, 1902.
Well, mother dear:
I have got it! I've just sent you a telegram, (I knew they would make you pay fifteen cents for bringing it up from the station,) so as to take away the taste of my last two or three gloomy letters as soon as possible; and now I am going to tell you all about it. When I told you the failure of those two places, that I went to look at with Miss Hally, I was so downhearted that I hardly knew what to do; I wanted to give up, and take the first train home, and try for a school again. But I used all the proverbs I could put my mind on, and I said my prayer when I went to bed, just like a little girl, and cried into my pillow like a big one, and woke the next morning as bold as brass. I went downtown and put in a new advertisement setting forth my gifts and accomplishments, bought all the papers, and read their " wanteds " over my lunch at the Woman's Exchange; and that night I got Miss Hally to go over them with me. We got a good deal of forlorn fun out of it, but not much encouragement, and then Miss Hally proposed a still hunt, as she called it. We . put aside two or three selected wanteds that we decided to investigate and see if they were deserving; and Miss Hally said she would begin the still hunt at once, by writing letters to half a dozen different people who might or might not be looking for a prize of my description, and offer them a chance in the raffle. She said this sort of thing would take time, but the results, even if they were failures would be more satisfactory than the other failures we had made. She looked awfully tired, for she had been writing out a long story, as she called it — a, biography-interview with a new English lecturess who has just come ashore — but she kindled up at the chance of killing herself for me, and when she put me out for the night she kind of held me off by both shoulders, and then pulled me up and kissed me, for luck, as she said, I was so overcome that I could not even shed a tear; I just gasped, and took it in frozen silence, like a true Lake Ridger.
It seemed to do as well as anything, though, so far as the luck was concerned, I got to thinking afterwards that perhaps it was not the right kind of kiss. The still hunt turned out as badly as the kind of gunning in the newspaper did when I first began to advertise, and when I felt as if everybody could see and hear me. Days, weeks, went by just as they do in novels when the author wants to skip; and yesterday I got word from the public telephone at our corner drug store that there was someone on the wire for me. You can bet, (or you could, if you ever did,) that I didn't let the grass grow under my feet, either on the stairs down to the door, or in the street outside. Somehow I just knew that this time I was it; and sure enough I found it was Miss Hally on the wire. She was calling me from the Hotel Walhondia, and she wanted to know if I could come right down, and I said I could come like lightning, and she told me to inquire for Miss Ralson and I would find her there too.
Well, I don't know how I got to the hotel or how I lived through sending my name from the office, and then followed it; but before I wanted to be, I was inside the Ralson apartment. Of course by that time I was in my usual frosty calm with strangers; but I tried to limber up enough to answer Miss Ralson's questions, and to realize that Miss Hally was going away and leaving us to each other as soon as the questions began. She gave me a squeeze of the hand that said it was all right, and I felt how nice it was of her not to stay and hear that I wouldn't do if I happened not to. Miss Ralson was pretty tremendous at first, and from time to time she was tremendous as we went on, but every now and then she broke down, and was not half so awful as I was. I think she saw that if she was to get at me at all, she would have to thaw me out to begin with. She asked me whether I had been to luncheon, and when I made out to remember I hadn't, she said she thought we could talk so much better over a little lunch, and she ordered her maid to order it served to us there; and all the time she kept on talking, and now and then breaking into the largest kind of laugh. She has a head of dark red hair, and the bluest blue eyes, and white cheeks with soft pink in them, and she is built on the sky-scraping plan of the new girl, with shoulders and a neck to beat the band. I have got a fresh supply of slang from Miss Ralson, for after we cosied down to the lunch, she talked so much of it that I had to talk it .too or seem impolite, and I was not going to do that. But she is business, every time, in spite of her ups and downs of manner, and I can tell you she put me through my paces pretty thoroughly.
She said that they wanted me to be a companion to her mother, and read to her and amuse her any way I could when she and her father could not he at home with her. But they did not want me for that alone; she needed a secretary to write her notes, and keep track of her engagements, and to go with her where a chaperon was not exactly needed, but two girls would do. She asked me if I would just write her a little note, then and there, and say whether I liked the notion, and what salary I should expect; she must have talked that point over with Miss Hally, for she said I could mention twelve hundred if I liked. She put me down at her desk with some note paper, and went away to the window, while I struggled with the note, and she kept coming back to see if I had finished. When I had, she looked pretty hard at it, and compared it with some notes she had received, and then she said. Yes, that would do first-rate. She asked me if I was sure about the spelling, because she always spelt salary -with two Us, and she offered to bet me what I dared that hers was the right way. We referred it to the dictionary leaves in her portfolio, and I won, of course, but we had forgot to say what we had bet, and so I didn't win anything but the bet. She seemed perfectly delighted, and she said that if there was anything she did envy another person it was spelling; and now she felt sure of me, if I thought I could get along with her mother.
She took me to her mother in the next room, and introduced me, and I had a wicked pleasure in seeing that Mrs. Ralson was more scared than I was. She is a very small old lady, not the least like her daughter, and she began to question me about where I came from, and my family, and whether I was homesick, and didn't I think New York was an awful place. I agreed to everything, and that seemed to cheer her up considerably, and she showed me the photograph of their house in Wottoma, Iowa, where they came from, and said it was considered the most beautiful " home " in the place. She pointed out the windows of her room, which Mr. Ralson had planned for her, and furnished himself, for a surprise, before she ever went into it, and she had never changed a thing. It was before they had formed the Cheese and Churn Trust, and always expected to live in Wottoma, but afterwards nothing would do America but to come to New York. That was better than Europe, anyway, where they had spent a year; and now Mr. Ralson had bought, up between Fifth Avenue and Madison, and they were going to build in the spring, and she supposed they should always live here, but she preferred Wottoma, herself, where you could have some ground around you, and everybody was neighborly. Well, mother, it made me a little homesick to hear her go on, and I showed that I felt for her, and before we got through, we were old friends, and she said she knew we could get on together first-rate, and she would not work me too hard, and I must not let Make. Make was a good girl, but she was thoughtless, and wanted to be on the go the whole while. She got to talking of Miss Ralson by her nickname, (her whole name is America) and of her husband by his first name, and she was so helplessly humble and simple, that I was glad her daughter had gone out of the room, for I am afraid she would have checked her, and I wouldn't have liked that. Mrs. Ralson is New England born, and I told her you were too, and then she seemed to think I was. I explained how Lake Ridge was settled from New England, and she said that if we were the same kind of people, it came to the same thing.
It is all as different from what I had planned, as could be, but I am not so sorry as I would have supposed. The Ralsons are not an old Knickerbocker family, with stately, highbred ways, and old mahogany sideboards and ancestral silver, but they will be, if they live here long enough; and I shall get on with them much better as they are at present. Perhaps an old Knickerbocker family would not have much use for me; and I shall have a better chance to grow up with the country here if I begin with an old Wottoma family. They may rot send me to Europe for my health, but I think they will let me go "out to see you in May, about apple-blossom time, with a pocket full of money for the June interest. How thankful I ought to be, and how thankful I am! I am going to do everything I can to deserve my good fortune, and you need not be afraid to hear of my misbehaving! It is all settled that I am to begin earning my salary, with two Us, tomorrow. The arrangement is for me to keep on here with Miss Hally, and not to live with the Ralson's, till they get into their house.
