Jim lived with his parents until he was twenty-one years old, and then he got a job in the office of a big factory in another town, so he left home. He found [bad word] little flat which had two rooms, a small kitchen and a bathroom, and he lived there on his own.
At first he cleaned it himself, but he did not want to have to go on doing this, so he determined to find someone else to do it instead of him. He asked a lot of his fellow workers at the factory what they did about this, and at last one of the men said, «Oh, Mrs. [bad word] and cleans my flat regularly. She washes the dishes, irons my shirts and keeps the place neat and tidy and so on. I'll introduce you to her, if you
like. She's a charming old lady. She does her best, but she hasn't got much energy.»
«Well, you'd better ask her [bad word] and see me, please,» Jim answered. So the next evening Mrs. Roper came to see him, and she agreed with pleasure [bad word] to his flat every morning for an hour.
After she had been working for Jim for two weeks, he looked at the mirror in his bedroom and thought, «That mirror looks very dusty. Mrs. Roper's forgotten to clean it. I can write on it with my finger.» He wrote a message in the dust: «I'm coughing whenever I breathe because everything in this room is very dusty.»
He came home at 7 o'clock that evening, and when he had eaten his supper, he went into his bedroom and looked at the mirror. «That silly old woman still hasn't cleaned it!» he said to himself. «All it needs is a cloth!»
But then he bent down and saw a bottle in front of the mirror. «I didn't put that bottle there.» He thought. «Mrs. Roper must have left it.» He picked the bottle up and looked at it carefully.
«She's written some words on it,» he said to himself. He read the words. They were: «Cough medicine.»