The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring Read Free Page B

should sit at home working on my embroidery and cultivating a pretty garden just because I am a woman. And I
am
the eldest.
    “I’ll try for this one position,” she said. “If I am unsuccessful, then perhaps I will go back to the country. It is beginning to look as though I am unemployable, does it not?”
    “Go back home, Charity,” Philip urged. “I am a mere clerk now, but I will rise to a better position and earn more money. Perhaps I will even be wealthy someday. And indeed you are not cut out to be in service. You do not have the necessary spirit of subservience. You lost the last position because you could not keep your opinions to yourself.”
    “No,” she said, grimacing. “I was of the opinion that the children’s father ought not to be molesting the prettiest chambermaid against her express wishes and I saidso—to both him and the children’s mother. He really was horrid, Phil. If you had known him, you would have disliked him excessively.”
    “I have no doubt of it,” he said. “But his behavior to another servant was not your concern, Charity. The girl had a tongue of her own, I daresay.”
    “But she was afraid to use it,” she said, “lest she lose her position.”
    Philip merely looked at his sister. He did not need to say anything.
    Charity laughed. “I had no wish to remain there anyway,” she said. “But I do wish positions were more easily come by. Six interviews in the past month and nothing to show for them. Perhaps I had better hope that Mrs. Earheart and her children
do
live in the Outer Hebrides and that no one but me will be intrepid enough to join them there.” She sighed. “Perhaps I should include in my letter of application my willingness to go to the ends of the earth. Perhaps they will pay more to compensate me for the remote situation.”
    “Charity,” Philip said, “I wish you would go home. The children miss you. Penny says so in all her letters. You have been like a mother to them ever since Mama died.”
    “I shall not mention my willingness,” she said as if she had not heard him. “I might sound overeager or groveling. And I shall try for this one last position. I shall probably not even receive a reply and all your wishes will be granted. But I shall feel such a helpless
woman
, Phil.”
    He sighed again.
    But Charity was proved wrong in one thing. Five days after she sent her letter of application to Mr. Earheart, she received a reply, inviting her to attend an interview the following morning. She felt her heart begin to palpitate at the very thought. It was so difficult to endurebeing questioned, more as if one were a commodity than a person. But it was the only way to employment. How cruel it was, though, to actually have an interview, to be this close, only perhaps to have one’s hopes dashed yet again.
    “This will be the seventh,” she said to Philip when he came home from work late in the evening. “Will this be the lucky one, do you suppose?”
    “If you really want the position, Charity,” he said with a sigh, “you must behave the part. Governesses, like other servants, you know, are to be seen and not heard.”
    She grimaced. Not that she was ever loud or vulgar. But she was a
lady
. She was accustomed to considering herself the equal of other ladies. It was hard to accustom herself to the knowledge that there was a despised class of shabby-genteel people—of whom she was one, at least as long as she sought employment. It was something that had to be ignored or endured. “I must be demure, then?” she said. “I may not offer my opinions or observations?”
    “No,” he said bluntly—and she realized with a sudden wave of pain that Philip must have had to learn the same lesson for himself. “You must convince the man, and his wife if she is present, that if they employ you, you will blend very nicely into the furniture of their home.”
    “How demeaning,” she said and then bit her lip, wishing she had not said the words