Fenella Swain — Fifi below stairs and everywhere else — is a lady's-maid of the first competence and the second sight, if by second sight one means an ear for whatever is said two rooms away. She hears more than a servant ought, which is to say exactly as much as a servant can, and what she does with it is her own economy. She keeps, besides, a standing preference for a gentleman's hat over a lady's and a studied vagueness as to whose; the gentlemen of the house have stopped counting theirs.
She is twin to Zane, the footman, and the two of them constitute a small sovereign nation of two, with its own treaties and its own silences. Households that employ one Swain generally come to employ the other; it is found to be simpler.