Today Ellen was here to work for the first time. It has given me an enormous lift, especially as the dark skies hang over us and still the snow has not come, but it is surely on the way. At first we worked together, changing sheets and planning what she might do. I realized the instant I began to look around how much has been neglected! And finally, at her suggestion, she simply set out to clean the house from top to bottom, at least all the rooms we use these days. I had dreaded having anyone under foot, dreaded Cornelius’s exasperation—he has become sensitive to any noise. But Ellen displaces so little atmosphere we hardly heard her moving about in her soft shoes. Her whole approach to this rough work is as subtle and rare as she herself is. She notices everything, even to cleaning a small silver ash tray in our bedroom. I hardly know how to explain the kind of presence I felt while she was here, so attentive to the house itself—perhaps it is that. She does not walk in as a stranger. She too remembers the past. When she lifts a framed photograph of Cornelius’s father to dust the bureau, she does it so gently, and I was amused to note that (just like me) she sometimes murmurs something to an object with which she is concerned. “There,” she will say when she has shaken out a rug and laid it down again, “that’s more like it.”

At eleven we all three had coffee together in the library. Cornelius hardly knows Ellen, I suddenly realized—realized by the way he looked at her, a penetrating look. He felt her distinction, and was much amused when she brushed aside the high and mighty Oldsens as “limited sensibilities,” a phrase Cornelius surely never expected to hear from the lips of a native. It brought back so vividly—and we spoke about it after Ellen left—some of the people who worked for us in the Touraine one summer when we rented a house near Vouvray. Our cleaning woman there had such dignity and spoke such pure French it made ours seem vulgar. She used to say of the Baron who owned the chateau nearby, “He lacks distinction, one must admit.” It was said in just the tone Ellen used about Mrs. Oldsen. It is not so much a matter of language as of values, I suppose. Ellen is an aristocrat by nature.

And somehow, because I waited for her to offer to help out, it is all right. She is coming not so much to work for us as to offer a neighborly hand in a time of trouble. So her pride, that fierce negative that censors so much of what she will or will not do or allow, is not in play.