The joke was made at the table on Tuesday, and everybody laughed except the man it was made in front of. "Invite the reading maid to dinner," said Lady Sowerby, "the one who is always in the library, and let us see what she has to say about Herodotus." It was meant to be cruel, and it was, and the Duke of Hollingbourne said nothing. By Thursday, nine people were expecting an entertainment, but what came through that door on Thursday evening was a woman in dark red silk with gold at the hem, and three people at that table knew whose gown it was before she had let go of the handle.

Hollingbourne had 4,000 books in it, and Alice Verity had read about 900. She had been a housemaid there for five years and had begun with the shelf nearest the door because that was where she could stand and still hear the passage, working along it in the twenty minutes after the library fire was laid and before the house woke up. It was not permitted, and she had never once asked whether it was permitted, on the sound principle that nobody who asks that question gets the answer they want. She was twenty-three, and her father had been a schoolmaster who taught her Latin because there was nobody else in that house to teach it to her; he died when she was seventeen, the school passed to a man with a wife, and Alice went into service.

She had been careless in March. That was how it began. Mr. Thorne, the butler, had come into the library at 10:06 on a Tuesday morning and found her on the steps with the fourth volume of Gibbon. He stood there for about eleven seconds, then said, "Put it back where it came from, and be about your work," and never mentioned it to anybody, as far as Alice ever discovered.

But the second footman had been in the passage, and the second footman told the kitchen, and the kitchen told the upstairs maid. By the end of the month, the household joke was that Verity read, and by June it had got upstairs. That was how, on the 7th of September, Lady Sowerby came to make it at the dinner table. Alice was in the room, which was the thing nobody at that table thought about for one second, because a housemaid handing round the second course is not, in the minds of such people, in the room at all.

Alice Verity had spent five years being a pair of hands at the edge of the candlelight and knew exactly how invisible she was. "Hollingbourne, is it true you keep a scholar?" Lady Sowerby asked. "I beg your pardon?"

"A scholar, below stairs," she said, her voice very pleasant. "Amelia had it from her woman. There is a housemaid here who reads Greek in the library at six in the morning, and I confess I have thought of nothing else since Sunday."

Somebody laughed. Alice, at the sideboard with the sauce, did not move at all. "It is Latin," said the Duke of Hollingbourne, "and it is not a secret, and she has my leave." That was true, and Alice had not known it. It went through her like cold water, because it meant Thorne had told him in March and he had said nothing for six months.

"Well, then," said Lady Sowerby, "let us have her up." The table made the sound a table makes when everyone is trying to react without appearing to react. "Ma'am," someone began. "No, I am perfectly serious, and I do not see what is objectionable in it," Lady Sowerby said, turning her glass.

"You have a maid who reads Latin. I have a niece at Bath who has been four years at a seminary at eighty guineas a year and cannot spell necessary. I should very much like to see them in the same room, and I cannot, so I shall settle for this one. Ask her to dinner, Hollingbourne. Thursday. Let us hear what she has to say about Herodotus."

"That is not kind," said somebody at the far end. It was Mrs. Cardew, quietly, the only person in that room Alice ever afterward thought well of.

"It is not unkind either," said Lady Sowerby. "I am not going to laugh at her. I am going to ask her four questions, and she will answer two of them beautifully and two of them wrong, and everybody at this table will be perfectly charmed and will talk of nothing else for a fortnight. It will be the making of the girl."

It was that, not the cruelty, which Alice had expected all her life, but the utter, comfortable certainty that a kindness was being done, that stayed with Alice Verity for forty years. The Duke of Hollingbourne did not say anything. That was the whole of it, and Alice went over it a great many times afterward, and it never came out any better. He did not agree, and he did not refuse; he looked down the table at Lady Sowerby for about four seconds, picked up his glass, and said, "As you please," and the conversation went somewhere else.

Alice took the sauce round the rest of the table and did not spill a drop. Mrs. Doggett gave her the invitation in the still room at nine the next morning and could not look at her. "You are asked to dinner on Thursday in the dining room with the company," the housekeeper said, her hands shaking slightly.

"His Grace's own word by Mr. Thorne. There is no getting out of it, Verity, and I have tried, and I want you to know that I have tried."

"I know you have, ma'am." Mrs. Doggett looked at her. "You could be ill." "I could be ill on Thursday," Alice agreed, "and then I should be the maid who was too frightened, and that would go round this county for eleven years, and it would come to the same thing in the end, but slower. I would rather have it over."

She folded the paper. Then she went and sat on the back stairs for about ten minutes, which she had not done since she was eighteen. What she was frightened of was not the questions. She had read 900 books in five years at six in the morning and was not afraid of four questions from a woman who thought Herodotus was a test.

She was frightened of the doorway. She was frightened of walking into a room in a gray stuff gown with a mended cuff and standing there while nine people looked at her, and of the four seconds before anybody spoke. She was frightened of knowing, for the rest of her life, exactly what she had looked like standing in it. She owned one gown that was not gray stuff, and it was black, and it had been her mother's, and it did not fit.