Miss Million's Maid

My story begins with an incident that is bound to happen some time in any household that boasts-or perhaps deplores-a high-spirited girl of twenty-three in it. It begins with "a row" about a young man. My story begins, too, where the first woman's story began-in a garden. It was the back garden of our red-roofed villa in that suburban street, Laburnum Grove, Putney, S.W. Now all those eighty-five neat gardens up and down the leafy road are one exactly like the other, with the same green strip of lawn just not big enough for tennis, the same side borders gay with golden calceolaria, scarlet geranium, blue lobelia, and all the bright easy-to-grow London flowers. All the villas belonging to the gardens seem alike, too, with their green front doors, their white steps, their brightly polished door-knockers and their well-kept curtains.