An hour after the tea guests had gone, I would join Miss Pride in the upstairs sitting-room where we had a glass of sherry and a light conversation, after which we went down to dinner. Sometimes she repeated an anecdote she had heard during the day or summarized a colloquy that had struck her fancy. Usually, though, she questioned me about my attitudes, interspersing her interrogation with pointers on conduct. One Friday night she requested me to come downstairs at tea time the following afternoon to be, as she said, “broken in,” an unfortunate phrase since it was also the one she used in speaking of servants whom she had trained. I was never, she admonished me, to regard myself as a servant. But at this phase of my career, when I had learned little more at the commercial school than which were the “home keys” on the typewriter, she could not truthfully call me her secretary. Moreover, being a woman completely sufficient unto herself, she could not introduce me as her “companion” without discrediting herself or making her friends suspect that her eyesight was failing. Nor could she pretend that I was a distant relative or the daughter of an old friend who until now had been in boarding school in Switzerland, for it would take no more than one conversation for anyone to know that I had no connections with Boston and therefore none with herself. What I was, in point of fact, was her “case” or her “project” or whatever the word was that was then in fashion to describe the beneficiary of that allotment in a rich woman’s budget called “Miscellany.” But wishing to spare my feelings (and also because practicing charity under one’s roof was seldom “done” unless the recipient was the orphan of a friend or relative who had been left with no money), she did not fancy my presentation in these terms. At first, it had been her intention to keep me imprisoned while she tutored me in etiquette and until I was able to operate a typewriter, but this plan soon appeared impracticable owing to the fact that my residence in the house had leaked out, presumably through the servants.