"Now the thing I am going to ask you. I want to say first that I have been trying to ask somebody for four years and have not been able to get it out of my mouth, and that Cardew came here in August because I wrote and asked her to, and then could not say it to her either." Alice said, "Ask it, sir."

"I want it finished," he said. The room was very quiet. "Two thousand books. Somebody has to stand at those shelves for about two years and write down what is there in her book, in her hand as near as can be managed, and I cannot do it because I do not know a folio from a duodecimo, and because I should not get through a week of it without-" He stopped.

"I cannot have a man down from London do it because a man from London would do it in six months in his own hand, and it would be a catalog, and it would not be hers. I have known that for four years, and it is why nothing has been done." Alice said, "And you want me to do it." "I want you to do it," said the Duke of Hollingbourne.

"I am aware of exactly what I am asking, and I want to say the whole of it plainly because I have spent this week finding out what happens when I do not. You would leave service. I would pay you eighty pounds a year, which is what I should pay a man, and it would be for two years and possibly three. At the end of it, you would be a woman of twenty-six with no place, no character as a servant because you would not have been one, and no character as anything else because there is no name for what you would have been."

"Every soul in this county would say the same thing about you, and it would not be true, and there would be no possible way of proving it was not." Alice sat with her hands in her lap. "You have thought about this a great deal," she said. "I have thought about nothing else since eleven on Thursday night."

"No, sir. You have thought about it since August, or you would not have written to Mrs. Cardew." Alice looked up at him.

"May I say a hard thing?" "I wish you would." She drew a breath.

"You did not send for me this morning because of Thursday. You have wanted this done for four years, and you have been looking for somebody who could do it, and there has been a housemaid reading Gibbon in this room at six in the morning since March, and you have known it since March, and you have said nothing for six months." The Duke of Hollingbourne did not answer.

"So on Tuesday night when Lady Sowerby said, 'Have her up,' some part of you thought, 'That is how it is done.' Not cruelly. I do not think you thought it in words at all. But a man does not sit at his own table and say, as you please, about a thing he is entirely against, sir, and I have had a night and a morning to work out why you did not stop her, and that is the only answer I can find that fits."

She had never in her life spoken to anybody like that. She heard herself do it and could not have stopped. The Duke of Hollingbourne came and sat down in the chair opposite hers, which no gentleman had ever done in front of Alice Verity in five years of service, and put his hands over his face. "Yes," he said.

Alice did not move. He took his hands away. "I did not know it on Tuesday. I have known it since about four this morning." He was extremely pale.

"I wanted her out of that room and into this one, and I did not want to be the man who did it. And so I let a woman I dislike do it for me, and it cost you everything, and it cost me nothing at all until Doggett made it cost me something." Neither of them said anything for a while. Alice finally said, "That is worse than what I thought you had done."

"Yes. It is a great deal worse. I am aware," said the Duke of Hollingbourne. "Which is why I am going to say the rest of it now, and it is this. The offer stands whatever you think of me. If you take it, you will be taking it from a man who did that, and you will know it, and I am not going to pretend that four years of paying you eighty pounds makes it into something else."

Alice Verity said yes on the 14th of September and began work on the 1st of October. She said yes for three reasons and wrote them down that night on the back of a bill, which she kept and which was found in her papers in 1871. One: because I want it. I have wanted it since March, and there is no use pretending I am doing anybody a favor.

Two: because there is nobody else living who will do it as it ought to be done. Three: because it is eighty pounds a year and I have not got a penny in the world, and I will not be a woman who says no to eighty pounds to keep her pride tidy. Underneath, in a different ink added some considerable time later, she wrote a fourth reason: because he told me the truth about himself when he did not have to, and I have never once in my life been able to walk away from a person who does that.

The terms were drawn by a solicitor at Ashford and were extremely peculiar, and Alice insisted on every one of them. Eighty pounds a year for three years, payable quarterly whether the work was finished or not. A room in the village at the Halletts, and not one night under the Hollingbourne roof, which was Alice's condition and which the Duke did not argue about for a second.

Her hours were nine until five, with the library door standing open the whole time and Mrs. Doggett or Thorne in the house. There was one clause the solicitor at Ashford queried twice: that at the end of the work Alice Verity should have, in writing, over the Duke's own signature, a plain statement of what she had been employed to do and what she had been paid. "Because in three years' time," said Alice, "I shall want a piece of paper that says the word catalog on it, and I do not care in the least what the county says as long as I have got that."