Barry Pain - Marge Askinforit

I simply turned round and left him, I was not going to stay there to be insulted.

However, he must have been ashamed of himself, for two days later he sub-let his part of the floor in one of the rooms at the Warren to an Irish family. If he was not ashamed, he was frightened.

Yet, curiously enough, that cowardly brute moulded my future.

The influx of the Irish family into the Warren drove me out of it. It made me feel the absolute necessity for a wider sphere.

On leaving home I took an indeterminate position in a Bayswater boarding-house. At any rate, my wages and food were determined, but my hours of work were not.

A boarding-house is a congeries of people who have come down. The proprietoress never dreamed that she would have to earn her own living like that—though she gets everything to a knife-edge certainty in the first week. Then in the drawing-room you have military people who have thundered, been saluted, been respected—and superseded. And nobody can make worse clothes look better. The cook explains why she’s not in Grosvenor Square, and the elderly Swiss waiter says that he has been in places where pace was not everytink. If you’re out looking for depression, try a boarding-house.

I stayed there a week and then said I was going. The lady said she knew the law and I couldn’t. So I said I would stay, and was sorry that the state of my nerves would mean a good deal in breakages.

I left at the end of the week.

After this I had a long succession of different situations. It is possible for a girl to learn the work of any branch of domestic service in a week, if she wishes to do it, with the exception of the work of a cook or a personal maid. But then, it is quite possible to take a situation as a cook, and to keep it, without knowing anything appreciable about the work. Thousands of women have done it, and are still doing it. I never went as personal maid—I dislike familiarity—but with that exception I played, so to speak, every instrument in the orchestra.

I acquired an excellent stock of testimonials, of which some were genuine. The others were due to the kindly heart and vivid imagination of my sister Casey, now Mrs. Morgenstein.

I rarely kept my places, and never kept my friends. The only thing I did keep was a diary. A diary is evidence. So if you see anything about anybody in these pages, you can believe it without hesitation. Do, please. You see, if you hesitate, you may never believe it.

I well remember the first and only time that I met Gladstone. I was staying with Lady Bilberry at the time at her house in Half Moon Street. She was a woman with real charm and wit, but somewhat irritable. Most of the people I’ve met were irritable or became so, and I can’t think why. I may add that I only stayed out my month as too much was expected. Besides, I’d been told there was a boy for the rough work and there never was.

But to return to Gladstone. I wrote down every precious word of my conversation with him at the time, and the eager and excited reader may now peruse it in full.

Gladstone: Lady Bilberry at home?

Marge: Yes, sir.

Gladstone: Thanks.

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