When she was seventeen years old she went to service in a bourgeois
family, in the large city near her native town, but she did not stay
there long. One day her mistress offered her maid--that was Anna--to
a friend, to see her home. Anna felt herself to be a servant, not a
maid, and so she promptly left the place.

Anna had always a firm old world sense of what was the right way for a
girl to do.

No argument could bring her to sit an evening in the empty parlour,
although the smell of paint when they were fixing up the kitchen made
her very sick, and tired as she always was, she never would sit down
during the long talks she held with Miss Mathilda. A girl was a girl
and should act always like a girl, both as to giving all respect and
as to what she had to eat.

A little time after she left this service, Anna and her mother made
the voyage to America. They came second-class, but it was for them a
long and dreary journey. The mother was already ill with consumption.

They landed in a pleasant town in the far South and there the mother
slowly died.

Anna was now alone and she made her way to Bridgepoint where an older
half brother was already settled. This brother was a heavy, lumbering,
good natured german man, full of the infirmity that comes of excess of
body.

He was a baker and married and fairly well to do.

Anna liked her brother well enough but was never in any way dependent
on him.

When she arrived in Bridgepoint, she took service with Miss Mary
Wadsmith.

Miss Mary Wadsmith was a large, fair, helpless woman, burdened with
the care of two young children. They had been left her by her brother
and his wife who had died within a few months of each other.

Anna soon had the household altogether in her charge.

Anna found her place with large, abundant women, for such were always
lazy, careless or all helpless, and so the burden of their lives could
fall on Anna, and give her just content. Anna's superiors must be
always these large helpless women, or be men, for none others could
give themselves to be made so comfortable and free.

Anna had no strong natural feeling to love children, as she had to
love cats and dogs, and a large mistress. She never became deeply fond
of Edgar and Jane Wadsmith. She naturally preferred the boy, for boys
love always better to be done for and made comfortable and full of
eating, while in the little girl she had to meet the feminine, the
subtle opposition, showing so e