Jenny Kuc̓erová had accomplished her twenty-first year just a week ago. Her school education was, according to her testimonials, most satisfactory and complete. She excelled in all kinds of sewing and fancy-work, played the piano and sang, spoke French fluently, and after leaving school had been for three years governess and teacher of three small children in the family of a Prague merchant. During these three years she had fulfilled her duties uninterruptedly to the entire satisfaction of the family, and all for the modest sum of twenty florins a month. Her New Year’s gift had been the amount of a month’s salary, and on her nameday she had been given a new woollen dress. This was all the means of income she possessed. Her morals were blame less, her “exterior” agreeable, her conversation pleasant, her disposition lively, but steady and sensible. She was not forward, nor given to dress or flirtation; but she sometimes knew how to carry her own point. To the lower servants she always behaved with dignity, to her employers most respectfully. As a particular characteristic, she was eagerly fond of solid reading.
Two things out of all these references were not to the liking of the Baroness Salomena regarding Jenny Kuc̓erová. One was, that she sometimes knew how to carry her own point; the other, that she would probably turn out a sort of bluestocking or philosopher. The first she considered altogether improper and unfit in a serving person; and as to female philosophers, she had felt a disgust to them all her life. And another thing—Jenny Kučerová seemed to her to be too young for a companion, and the “agreeable exterior” was also somewhat against her. Both the baroness and her daughter were plain, and this may have been the reason that the old
