he inexpungable evils of
existence, like mosquitoes, or her father's temper, or the smell of
Pearl's cheap talcum powder when warmed by the fumes of cooking cabbage.
But gradually it came upon her that dirt only accumulated in the absence
of a will to removal.

Once her outreaching mind had grasped--without wordily
formulating--this physical and moral law, her course was plain. Since
the will to removal was dormant or missing in Pearl, she must supply it.
Within the scope of her childish strength, she did supply it. Susan
insists that it took her two years merely to overcome the handicap of
Pearl's neglect. Her self-taught technique was faulty; proper tools were
lacking. There was a bucket which, when filled, she could not lift; a
broom that tripped her; high corners she could not reach--corners she
had to grow up to, even with the aid of a chair. But in the end she
triumphed. By the time she was thirteen--she was thirteen when I first
saw in the Eureka Garage--Bob's four rooms were spotless six and
one-half days out of every seven.

Even Pearl, in her flaccid way, approved the change. "It beats hell,"
she remarked affably to Bob one night, "how that ugly little monkey
likes to scrub things. She's a real help to me, that child is. But no
comp'ny. And she's a sight."

"Well," growled Bob, "she comes by that honest. So was the old woman."
They were annoyed when Susan, sitting by them, for the first time within
their memory burst into flooding, uncontrollable tears.

IV

I should probably, in my own flaccid way, have lost all track of Susan,
if it had not been for certain ugly things that befell in Bob's
four-room house one breathless evening--June twentieth of the year 1907.
It is a date stamped into my consciousness like a notarial seal. For one
thing it happened to be my birthday--my thirty-third, which I was not
precisely celebrating, since it was also the anniversary of the day my
wife had left me, two years before. Nor was I entirely pleased to have
become, suddenly, thirty-three. I counted it the threshold of
middle-age. Now that eleven years have passed, and with them my health
and the world's futile pretense at peace, I am feeling younger.

This book is about Susan, but it will be simpler if you know something,
too, concerning her scribe. Fortunately there is not much that it will
be needful to tell.

I was--in those bad, grossly comfortable old days--that least happy of
Nature's experiments, a man whos