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painful, even with feline company.
    And then one day Edith came to her and said, “I know you love your little space uptown, Tonni, but won’t you come down and live in Number 882? You’ll have two rooms of your own, a sitting room and a bedroom. You can bring all your pretty things. The kitties can come, of course. It would be absolutely free, and Gross would love your company. Besides, I need you closer to me. The streetcar has disappointed us one too many times.” A month later the narrow house right next to Edith’s became her primary home.
    But the top floor of this building in Paris houses a special treat: the common room where an ever-changing cast of servants gathers in the evenings. Sometimes Anna sits by the fire with a book. But more often than not, after a page or two, she turns the book upside down in her lap and chats with the servants from other households. She is keen to know what other families are like, where and how they travel, and how they treat their staffs. Tonight she takes her darning egg and a pair of worn stockings and walks down the hall to see who is in the common room. Though it is very late, she finds Louise, one of the friendliest ladies’ maids, seated in the most comfortable chair by the fire. By her is one of the footmen, and across the room, a seamstress who has come for just a week to sew a new wardrobe for the very wealthy but very fat lady who lives one floor above the Whartons.
    Anna has never forgotten what Louise told her when she first arrived: “My mistress only wears her dresses once or twice and often gives them to me. She gives me her jewelry too. She gets tired of everything.”
    “But whenever do you wear such grand things?” Anna asked.
    “The best ones I have remade for me. The rest I just enjoy having. This was hers.” Anna recalls how Louise plucked a golden chain from her bodice. Dangling from it was a heavy gold seal. Edith has drawers of jewelry similar to this, but Anna can’t imagine Edith giving away a single piece. Could someone be so rich that things of such value hold no meaning? And at that moment, Anna thought of her own great prize, the secret locket she wears against her heart always.
His
locket. Nothing could make her part with it.
    “My mistress smokes opium,” Josette, a little French maid with a strawberry mark on her cheek, whispered last week. “Her skin is turning a terrible shade of yellow. Soon her husband will leave her. I see how he looks at her with disgust. I keep dreaming she’s died. I fear I’ll come to wake her one morning and she’ll be cold as ice.”
    Anna carries these stories with wonder and sadness, thinking about them for days afterward. If one were lucky enough to have such a life of privilege, how could it be tossed aside so casually? She considers telling Edith about the lady who smokes opium, but stops herself. The story was told in confidence. Doctors do not share information outside the sanctity of their offices. As a governess, as a secretary, Anna has spent a lifetime straddling a life of service and Edith’s world. And despite her middle-class roots, she is more comfortable as a servant after all these years. In the servants’ hall, she’s admired. Edith, lately, sees her faults and points them out too often. Sometimes, Anna feels like a mother whose child has grown beyond her, a child who no longer remembers the tenderness they once shared.
    Tonight, unsettled by Teddy Wharton’s growing melancholy, an issue Edith doesn’t seem to acknowledge, Anna chooses the settee near the footman where a glowing oil lamp brightens the corner enough that she can do her darning. She slides the china egg into the toe of one of the stockings and threads up the needle. She is surprised when the young footman launches into conversation.
    “I hear your employer is famous,” he says.
    She looks up, puzzled.
    “Mr. Wharton? He’s not famous.”
    “No. It’s the missus who’s famous. That’s what I hear. She’s a famous