[Illustration: "IN WINTER THE GREAT WHITE FLIGHTS OF GULLS"]
Since my experience with 'Enrietter, the pages of Zola and the De Goncourts have seemed a much more comfortable place for "human documents" and "realism" than the family circle. Her adventures in our London chambers make a thrilling story, but I could have dispensed with the privilege of enjoying the thrill. When your own house becomes the scene of the story you cannot help taking a part in it yourself, and the story of 'Enrietter was not precisely one in which I should have wanted to figure had it been a question of choice.
It all came of believing that I could live as I pleased in England, and not pay the penalty. An Englishman's house is his castle only when it is run on the approved lines, and the foreigner in the country need not hope for the freedom denied to the native. I had set out to engage the wrong sort of servant in the wrong sort of way, and the result was--'Enrietter. I had never engaged any sort of servant anywhere before, I did not much like the prospect at the start, and my first attempts in Registry Offices, those bulwarks of British conservatism, made me like it still less. That was why, when the landlady of the little Craven Street hotel, where we waited while the British Workman took his ease in our chambers, offered me 'Enrietter, I was prepared to accept her on the spot, had not the landlady, in self-defence, stipulated for the customary formalities of an interview and references.
The interview, in the dingy back parlour of the hotel, was not half so unpleasant an ordeal as I had expected. Naturally, I do not insist upon good looks in a servant, but I like her none the less for having them, and a costume in the fashion of Whitechapel could not disguise the fact that 'Enrietter was an uncommonly good-looking young woman; not in the buxom, red-cheeked way that my old reading of Miss Mitford made me believe as inseparable from an English maid as a pigtail from a Chinaman, nor yet in the anæmic way I have since learned for myself to be characteristic of the type. She was pale, but her pallor was of the kind more often found south of the Alps and the Pyrenees. Her eyes were large and blue, and she had a pretty trick of dropping them under her long lashes; her hair was black and crisp; her smile was a recommendation. And, apparently, she had all the practical virtues that could make up for her abominable cockney accent and for the name of 'Enrietter, by which she introduced herself. She did not mind at all coming to me as "general," though she had answered the landlady's advertisement for parlour maid. She was not eager to make any bargain as to what her work was, and was not, to be. Indeed, her whole attitude would have been nothing short of a scandal to the right sort of servant. And she was willing with a servility that would have offended my American notions had it been a shade less useful.