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Page 47
"Do suggest it to him."
"Don't you think he would resent it from a valet?"
"I keep forgetting that you are a valet. You look so unlike one."
"Old Peters didn't think so. He rather complimented me on my
appearance. He said I was ordinary-looking."
"I shouldn't have called you that. You look so very strong and
fit."
"Surely there are muscular valets?"
"Well, yes; I suppose there are."
Ashe looked at her. He was thinking that never in his life had he
seen a girl so amazingly pretty. What it was that she had done to
herself was beyond him; but something, some trick of dress, had
given her a touch of the demure that made her irresistible. She
was dressed in sober black, the ideal background for her
fairness.
"While on the subject," he said, "I suppose you know you don't
look in the least like a lady's maid? You look like a disguised
princess."
She laughed.
"That's very nice of you, Mr. Marson, but you're quite wrong.
Anyone could tell I was a lady's maid, a mile away. You aren't
criticizing the dress, surely?"
"The dress is all right. It's the general effect. I don't think
your expression is right. It's--it's--there's too much attack in
it. You aren't meek enough."
Joan's eyes opened wide.
"Meek! Have you ever seen an English lady's maid, Mr. Marson?"
"Why, no; now that I come to think of it, I don't believe I
have."
"Well, let me tell you that meekness is her last quality. Why
should she be meek? Doesn't she go in after the groom of the
chambers?"
"Go in? Go in where?"
"In to dinner." She smiled at the sight of his bewildered face.
"I'm afraid you don't know much about the etiquette of the new
world you have entered so rashly. Didn't you know that the rules
of precedence among the servants of a big house in England are
more rigid and complicated than in English society?"
"You're joking!"
"I'm not joking. You try going in to dinner out of your proper
place when we get to Blandings and see what happens. A public
rebuke from the butler is the least you could expect."
A bead of perspiration appeared on Ashe's forehead.
"Heavens!" he whispered. "If a butler publicly rebuked me I think
I should commit suicide. I couldn't survive it."
He stared, with fallen jaw, into the abyss of horror into which
he had leaped so light-heartedly. The servant problem, on this
large scale, had been nonexistent for him until now. In the days
of his youth, at Mayling, Massachusetts, his needs had been
ministered to by a muscular Swede. Later, at Oxford, there had
been his "scout" and his bed maker, harmless persons both,
provided you locked up your whisky. And in London, his last
phase, a succession of servitors of the type of the disheveled
maid at Number Seven had tended him.
That, dotted about the land of his adoption, there were houses in
which larger staffs of domestics were maintained, he had been
vaguely aware. Indeed, in "Gridley Quayle, Investigator; the
Adventure of the Missing Marquis"--number four of the series--he
had drawn a picture of the home life of a duke, in which a butler
and two powdered footmen had played their parts; but he had had
no idea that rigid and complicated rules of etiquette swayed the
private lives of these individuals. If he had given the matter a
thought he had supposed that when the dinner hour arrived the
butler and the two footmen would troop into the kitchen and
squash in at the table wherever they found room.
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