I don't think she will be able to dress hair, or anything of that
sort--save in the way of plain sewing, she is very unskilful with
her hands; and she will be of no use as courier, she is so
provincial and inexperienced. She has no head for business
whatever, and cannot help Francesca with the accounts. She recites
to herself again and again, 'Four farthings make one penny,
twelvepence make one shilling, twenty shillings make one pound'; but
when I give her a handful of money and ask her for six shillings and
sixpence, five and three, one pound two, or two pound ten, she
cannot manage the operation. She is docile, well mannered,
grateful, and really likable, but her present philosophy of life is
a thing of shreds and patches. She calls it 'the science,' as if
there were but one; and she became a convert to its teachings this
past winter, while living in the house of a woman lecturer in Salem,
a lecturer, not a 'curist,' she explains. She attended to the door,
ushered in the members of classes, kept the lecture-room in order,
and so forth, imbibing by the way various doctrines, or parts of
doctrines, which she is not the sort of person to assimilate, but
with which she is experimenting: holding, meantime, a grim
intuition of their foolishness, or so it seems to me. 'The science'
made it easier for her to seek her ancestors in a foreign country
with only a hundred dollars in her purse; for the Salem priestess
proclaims the glad tidings that all the wealth of the world is ours,
if we will but assert our heirship.
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