Alice Devine Author:Edgar Jepson General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1916 Original Publisher: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Subjects: Fiction / Literary Fiction / Romance / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of... more » this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III THE ANARCHISTS I THOUGHT about the ghost-girl for several days. She was no more a housemaid than I was; housemaids don't have voices like that, and it was her voice that chiefly stuck in my mind. I kept an eye, or rather both eyes, through my uncle's field-glasses, on Number 9, on the chance of seeing her come out of it. I wanted to see whether her face matched her voice. All the while I was hard at work; and I did not find work such a bore as I had expected. For one thing, it was a change to have things to do that had to be done, and its being a change softened it. Besides, it was pleasant to find that I could do things. Mugging up price lists of house-fittings sounds an awful grind, but when I found that I did get prices into my head, it did not bore me. I found that knowledge of price lists useful in interviewing contractors. Jack Thurman and I, but chiefly Jack, of course, were not very long in discovering that, thanks to the broad and generous ideas of Siddle and Wod- gett, his house-agents, my uncle had paid through the nose for the upkeep and repairs of the Gardens. I felt that I could spend my money just as well as my contractors could spend it for me. Therefore I set about getting fresh estimates, and making fresh contracts for all the work. Every contractor came to his interview with an iron resolve to pull my leg. Most of them seemed to want to lick my boots, too, because I was a peer. But it was quite clear that they were not going to let that fact, which seemed to make th...« less