I sometimes think that it must have been a sense of impending autobiography which made me seek employment in the Lightning Laundry. After all, the autobiographist merely does in public what the laundry does in the decent seclusion of its works at Wandsworth or Balham.

The principal difference would appear to be that a respectable laundress does know where to draw the line.

But I admit that I had other motives in seeking a new career. My attempt to reclaim baronets in their dinner-hour had broken down completely; in spite of everything I could do, the dirty dogs would persist in eating their dinner at that time. Then again, the beautiful and imaginative essays which dear Casey wrote, under different names and with varying addresses, on my suitability for domestic service, had begun to attract too much attention; and a censorious world stigmatized as false and dishonest what was really poetical. I wanted too, a position of greater independence.

Of course, I had to learn the work. At first I was taught the leading principles of button-removal. Then I went on to the rough-edging. This consists in putting a rough edge on starched collars and cuffs with a coarse file. Afterwards I was promoted to the mixing department. This is where the completed articles are packed for delivery. It requires great quickness and a nice sense of humour. For instance, you take up a pair of socks and have to decide instantly whether you will send them both to an elderly unmarried lady, or divide them impartially between two men. Our skill in creating odd socks and stockings was gratefully recognized by the Amalgamated Hosiers’ Institution, who paid the laundry an annual subsidy. A good memory was essential for the work. Every girl was required to memorize what size in collars each male client took, so that the fifteen-inch collars might be sent to the man with the seventeen-inch neck and vice-versa. As the manager said to me once: “What we are here for is to teach people self-control. The rest is merely incidental.”

I did not remain very long in the mixing department. My head for figures soon earned me a place in the office. Much of it was routine work. Four times every year we had to send out the notices that owing to the increased cost of labour and materials we were reluctantly compelled to increase our prices 22-1/2 per cent. We made it 22-1/2 per cent. with the happy certainty that very few of our customers would be able to calculate the amount of the increase, and still fewer would take the trouble; this left a little room for the play of our fancy. As one of our directors—a man with a fine, scholarly head—once said to me: “Bring the larger vision into the addition of a customer’s account. The only natural limit to the charge for washing a garment is the cost of the garment. Keep your eyes ever on the goal. Our present prices are but milestones on the road.” He had a beautiful, ecclesiastical voice. Nobody would have guessed that he was an engineer and the inventor of the Button-pulper and Hem-render which have done so much to make our laundries what they are.

From the very first day that I took up my work in the office I became conscious that Hector, the manager, had his eye upon me. He would generally read a page or two of Keats or Shelley to us girls, before we began to make out the customers’ accounts. This was all in accord with the far-seeing and generous policy of the laundry. The reading took a little time, but it filled us with the soaring spirit. It made pedantic precision and things-that-are repulsive to us. After I heard Hector read the “Ode to a Nightingale” I could not bring myself to say that two and two were four; nothing less than fourteen seemed to give me any satisfaction. Hector knew how quickly responsive and keenly sentient I was. A friend once told me that he had said of me that I made arithmetic a rhapsody. “This,” I replied quietly, “means business.”

It did. One Saturday afternoon I had tea with him—not on the Terrace, as the A.B.C. shop in the High Street was so much nearer. He was very wonderful. He talked continuously for two hours, and would have gone on longer. But the waitress pointed out that the charge for a cup of tea and a scone did not include a twenty-one years’ lease of the chair you sat on.

He was, of course, a man of great scientific attainments. His work on the use of acids in fabric-disintegration has a reputation throughout the laundries of Europe. But he had not the habit of screaming blasphemies which my Great Example failed to convince anybody that she had discovered in Huxley. In brief, he did not conform to the unscientific idea of what a scientific man must be like. He was a cultured idealist. I will try to recall a few of the marvellous things he said that afternoon.

In reply to some remark of mine, he said with authority and conviction: “Marge, you really are.”

And, indeed, I had to admit that very often I am.

He was saying that in this world gentle methods have effected more than harsh, and added this beautiful thought: “In the ordeal by laundry the soft-fronted often outlasts the starched.”

Later, I led him on to speak of ambition.

“I am ambitious. That is to say, I live not in the present, but in the future. At one time I had a bicycle, but in imagination I drove a second-hand Ford; and now I possess the Ford, and in imagination I have a Rolls-Royce. I once held a subordinate position in the laundry, but in imagination I was the manager; and now I am the manager, and in imagination am asked to join the Board of Directors. As the poet Longfellow so wisely said—Excelsior. Engraved in letters of gold on the heart of the ambitious are these words: ‘And the next article?’ At this present moment I am having a cup of tea with by far the most brilliant and beautiful girl of my acquaintance, but in imagination——”

And it was just there that the tactless waitress interrupted us so rudely. It was in vain that I tried to lead him back to the subject. Almost his last words to me that afternoon were:

“I suppose you don’t happen to know what the time is?”

Nor did I. It was just an instance of his subtle intuition. He understood me at once and without effort. Many men have made a hobby of it for years and never been within three streets of it.

The clock at the post-office gave him the information he required, and, raising his hat, he said: “Well, I must be getting on.”

The whole of the man’s life was in that sentence. Always, he was getting on—and always with a compulsion, as of destiny, shoving behind.

Knowing my keen appreciation of art, of which I have always been a just and unfailing critic, he took me on the following Saturday to see the pictures. It was not a good show—too many comics for my taste, and I’d seen the Charlie Chaplin one before. However, in the dim seclusion of the two-shilling seats just as the eighteenth episode of “The Woman Vampire” reached its most pathetic passage, and the girl at the piano appropriately shifted to the harmonium, Hector asked me if I would marry him.

(No, I shan’t. I know I’m an autobiographer and that you have paid to come in, but there are limits. You know how shy and retiring I am. No nice girl would tell you what the man said or did on such an occasion, or how she responded. There will be no details. And you ought to be ashamed of yourself.)

But just one of Hector’s observations struck me particularly: “You know, Marge, there are not many girls in the laundry I would say as much to.”

That statement of preference, admitting me as it were to a small circle of the elect, meant very much to me. I could only reply that there were some men I wouldn’t even allow to take me to a cinema. I asked, and was accorded, time for consideration.

I was face to face with the greatest problem of my life. There was, I know, one great drawback to my marriage with Hector. An immense risk was involved. When the end of this chapter is reached the reader will know what the risk and drawback were.

At the same time, everybody knew well that Hector was marked out for a great position. I had already, with a view to eventualities, had some discussion with one of the Directors, Mr. Cashmere, whom I have already quoted. I was a special favourite of his. But it is quite an ordinary thing in business, of course, for a Director to discuss the internal affairs of the Board with one of the Company’s junior clerks.

Mr. Cashmere expressed the highest opinion of Hector, and said he had no doubt that Hector would become a Director, as a result of a complicated situation that had arisen. Two of the Directors, Mr. Serge and Mr. Angora, while remaining on the best possible social terms with the chairman, Sir Charles Cheviot, were bitterly opposed to him on questions of policy. On the other hand, though agreed on questions of policy, Mr. Serge and Mr. Angora were bitterly jealous of each other, and a rupture was imminent. Under the circumstances, Mr. Cashmere, while assuring everybody of his whole-hearted support, had a private reservation of judgment to be finally settled by the directional feline saltation.

Whichever turn the crisis took, he regarded it as certain that there would be a resignation, and that Hector would get the vacant place.

“Why,” I said, “it’s rather like the Government of the British Empire.”

“Hush!” he said, warningly. “It is exactly like it, but in the interests of the shareholders we do not wish that to be generally known. It would destroy confidence.”

I myself felt quite certain that if Hector did become a Director he would very shortly be chairman of the Board. He was a man that naturally took anything there was.

It was in my power to marry a man who would become the chairman of a Laundry Company with seventeen different branches. It was a great position. Had I any right to refuse it? If I did not take it, I felt sure that somebody else would. Was anybody else as good as I was? Truth compelled me to answer in the negative. The voice of conscience said: “Take a good thing when you see it. People have lost fortunes by opening their mouths too wide.”

On the other hand there were two considerations of importance. I might possibly receive a better offer. If I had been quite sure that Hector would have taken it nicely, I would have asked him for a three months’ option to see if anything better turned up, but I knew that with his sensitive nature he might be offended.

The second consideration was the terrible risk to which I have already referred. Do be patient. You will know all about it when the time comes.

I had to decide one way or the other, and—as the world knows now—I decided in favour of Hector. And immediately the storm broke.

Every old cat that I knew—and I knew some—began to give me advice. Now, nobody takes advice better than I do, when I am conscious that I need it and am sure that the advice is good. Of this I feel as sure as if such an occasion had ever actually arrived. In an International Sweet-nature Competition I would back myself for money every time.

I was told that in the dignified position which was to be mine I must give up larking about and the use of wicked words when irritated. It seemed to me that if I was to surrender all my accomplishments I might just as well never marry Hector at all. I avoid a certain freedom of speech which my great predecessor uses on a similar occasion.

Dear old Mr. Cashmere found me in almost a bad temper about it, and listened gravely to my complaint. Placing one hand on my shoulder, he said:

“Marge, I have lived long, and in the course of my life I have received much advice. My invariable rule has always been to thank for it, expressing my gratitude with some warmth and every appearance of sincerity. This is all that the adviser requires. It gives him, or her, complete satisfaction. It costs nothing. Afterwards, I proceed precisely as if no advice had been given.”

That freak, Millie Wyandotte, sent me a plated toast-rack and a letter from which I extract the following:

Mr. J. A. Banting sent me a travelling-clock at one time the property of Lord Baringstoke, and a letter of such fervent piety and tender affection that it is too sacred for me to quote.

Fifty-eight rejected suitors combined to send me a hand-bag of no great intrinsic value. I cannot but think that the principle of syndication is more suited to business than to generosity.

But I will not weary the reader with a list of the numerous and costly gifts that I received. Suffice it to say that one of my brothers, an excellent judge, offered me a fiver for the lot, and said that he expected to lose money by it.

Immediately after the wedding ceremony the blow fell. I had foreseen the danger of disaster from the very first, and that disaster came. I can hardly bring myself to write of it.

I have spoken of my husband as Hector, but his surname was Harris—his mother was one of the Tweeds. Consequently, I had become Mrs. Harris.

The tendency of a Mrs. Harris to become mythical was first noticed by an English writer of some repute in the nineteenth century. I forget his precise name, but believe that it was Thackeray.

It was in the vestry that I seemed to hear the voice of an elderly and gin-bemused female telling me that there was no sich person. I did not cease to exist, but I became aware that I never had, and never could have, existed. I was merely mythical. Gently whispering “The Snark was a Boojum,” I faded away.

The last sound I heard was the voice of Hector calling to me:

“Hullo, hullo! Are you there? Harris speaking.... Hullo, hullo.... Are you there?”

And, as not infrequently happens, there was no answer.