Memoirs of a Femme De Chambre Author:Marguerite Blessington General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1846 Original Publisher: B. Tauchnitz Subjects: Fiction / General Fiction / Classics Fiction / Historical Fiction / Literary Fiction / Short Stories Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missin... more »g text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: 266 ii; i- T- ' v i How provoking that Miss Stratford had no maid, and for the first time Mrs. Price regretted that governesses were not permitted such luxuries, for had a maid been in the case, how easily could she have learned every particular, of not only what the servant knew, but also what she imagined, and how soon a structure of falsehood could be erected on a small base of truth, no one knew better. Mrs. Nurse kept up a frequent correspondence with a nephew of hers, a young man named Stubbmgs, a clerk in a solicitor's office. This nephew greatly resembled his aunt in more than one of his propensities -- he liked gossip, and particularly scandal; had a lively imagination for giving a high colour to the tales he repeated, and sometimes won golden opinions in the shape of half-sovereigns, sent up under the seal from his aunt, in return for the gossip he sent her down in his letters. She was proud to show the good writing, the decent letter-paper, the seal with a crest of a lion rampant, her own gift, impressed on the letters from this nephew, and proud also to show the address of hers to him in return, with the "Esq." never forgotten. -- "Who knows," thought Mrs. Price, "but Jim may be able to find out something about this girl. She has sufficient good looks to have excited attention, and her name is not so common an one as to be mistaken or forgotten. Jim Stubbings knows something of every one; he is such a sharp clever lad that no one can find out...« less