It obviously was a flub that Maggie Evans quickly came up with a fictional name while on the train to Collinsport, since it was equally obvious that she had applied for the job and had been hired before journeying north. Well, so what? Aren't flubs all part-and-parcel of DS? Didn't they exist in every incarnation of it? Without them, they wouldn't be DS. Maybe Depp/Burton intended it and wanted to see if anyone caught on. After all, Cameron, who wanted to make everything on Titanic to be historically perfect had smoke coming out of the fourth stack - he did that deliberately for Titanic buffs, since the fourth funnel was a dummy that served as storage for deck chairs. And S.E. Hinton somehow got the publishers to retrain one "flub" in her reworked novel, Hawkes Harbor (the obvious original title must've been Collinsport), for us DS fans. I'm surprised JP didn't go ballistic over that and started filing multiple lawsuits. You know how finicky he is about anyone taking away one penny regarding DS from what he thinks he is the ultimate guardian of every cent that goes to, well, whom? Keep those youtube videos shut down and banned, JP. We all know that if they're on there without making one cent for anyone, somehow whomever you want to get a penny isn't getting it. Good job.
Anyway, now that my rant is over (how much money did JP and his "clients" get from this film? - alright, alright, rant is over), in the movie, from how I took it, Maggie was pretty much on her own for quite some time after she escaped Windcliffe (or however one wants to spell it). She just didn't climb down those bedsheets and within days was on a train. She spent time living on her own, doing what she had to do to survive, for quite some time before she saw that ad. I can picture her slashing hash at a diner while offering the best cup of coffee around and a free piece of pie and telling people they were "jerks" for whatever reason, and then consoling them by calling them "honey." It was 1972 and a couple years before. It was easier then to do that. She lived in a bedroom in a boarding house, using the shared bathroom down the hall with women named Buffie Harrington (the only one who had a TV with rabbit ears), biding her time, wanting to find the answers to her dilema. And then one day she busy a newspaper with an ad for a governess. From there, the movie begins.
Gerard