Miss Mole by E.H. Young — Read

It was a long time since Hannah had lived with a family. After an exhausting experience in which she had battled with half-a-dozen riotous children, an ailing mother and a father who tried to be confidential about the trials and disappointments of marriage, she had taken a post with an old lady in the hope of comparative leisure and, like an actress who makes a success in a particular kind of part and finds it difficult to get another, she had seemed doomed to old, invalid and lonely ladies for the rest of her life. She had naturally been suspected of inability to deal with the young after an existence of picking up dropped stitches, fetching clean pocket handkerchiefs and reading aloud, though Hannah could have been eloquent about the wearing nature of such work. Often, she had looked at a charwoman with envy, desiring healthy labour with brush and bucket, and for her folly in not hiring a bedroom and letting herself out by the day, she blamed what must have been an odd lingering desire for the gentility she affected to despise. She would have made an admirable charwoman: that vulgar strain in her which Lilla justly deplored, so unsuitable in a companion or a housekeeper, would have been a positive recommendation in a charwoman, and she pictured herself, going from house to house, energetic, good-humoured, free of speech, the perfect charwoman of fiction, with a home which was all her own and none of these tangled personalities to deal with. Well, she would tell herself with a sniff, she might come to it yet, but women in that walk of life were not liable to be made the heirs of rich old gentlemen, and towards that pleasant prospect Hannah still pretended to be gazing. She had seen no one in the chapel who answered to the description, and though she had waved a duster out of every window, she had not met No. 16's roguish leer. A sparkling October had given place to a damp November and the weather, she supposed, was bad for parrots and for gardening. She sometimes saw No. 16 trundling towards the back gate, she heard him calling in the cats at night, but she had no time to plan encounters, for she worked as hard as any charwoman and had to adapt herself to new and difficult conditions.

In her other situations where there was a man of the house, he had left it at a reasonable hour in the morning and could be trusted not to reappear until the evening: there was no such regularity in the movements of Mr. Corder. The absence or presence of his hat and coat was the only surety that he was out or in, and it became a habit with Hannah to glance at the pegs as she went through the hall and to feel her spirits rising or falling with what she saw there, another unwilling confession that his personality was not negligible. Hannah's somewhat toneless singing, which contrasted so strangely with the quality of her speaking voice, was generally silenced when he was in the house; he damped down the tempers of his daughters and Hannah wondered if he knew they had them; he stifled conversation, for he was ready with information on all subjects, and opinions which differed from his own either amused or angered him, yet hardly a day passed without a caller, someone needing help or advice, an ardent chapel worker with some difficulty to be solved, a deacon on a mission of importance, and the voice which came from the study was not always Robert Corder's, and though he might lead the laughter, there was response to it, and people went away looking happier than they had come. Nevertheless, Hannah would make a grimace at the study door as she passed. She was sure Mrs. Corder, from her place on the great man's desk, was listening gravely to what he said and making her acute, silent comments, balancing the counsels he gave against what she knew of him and yet, more tolerant than Hannah, refusing to judge him harshly.