he announced dryly. "You
must be nearly dead, Miss Merry! And all ready for dinner, too! I've
had a clean table cloth put on, and what do you think that Delia said?
'I'll just rub out me apron an' press it off,' she said, 'for if
_she's_ to head the table, I can see she'll be particular!'"

Nothing could have kept Miss Mary up but the fact that her own room was
yet uncleaned. The lust of soap and water had entered into her, and
she ate and answered and passed the butter dish like one in a dream,
looking forward with the last of her strength to sleeping in an
immaculate chamber. And at half-past one in the morning, she did so.
The warm bath in the painted tin tub was a luxury she had never
imagined; as the sheets received her tired body, aching in every joint,
she tasted for the one moment before sleep blotted out consciousness
the ecstasy of earned rest after steady, worried toil, and it was very
sweet. Privilege of the clumsiest hod-carrier, it was utterly new to
Miss Mary, and she in her innocence, thought it due to delight at the
prospect of board and lodging and, say, twenty-five dollars a month!

She did not know that she had hummed, unconsciously, during the
afternoon, a song of her early girlhood; nor that the blood, long
stagnant, that had raced through every vein as she stooped and beat and
lifted and cleansed, was driving the crawling vapours from that
mysterious grey tissue in her skull that had so long plagued and
confused her.

Nor did she know that the flowers on the table, the fresh chintz covers
for the worn lodging-house furniture, so recklessly provided by her,
the quick neatness of an apotheosised Delia and the gentle, reserved
welcome of the new housekeeper herself, were lifting the commonplace
boarding-house to a higher and still higher level. She only knew that
she worked harder and harder and never wept nor shuddered nor looked
out of black apathy into a cruel tantalizing world, whose inhabitants
had evil thoughts of her and wished and worked her ill.

"It's just as I always say," Mrs. Palmer observed, one afternoon in
May, as, resting in frank gingham and enveloping apron, she permitted
herself the luxury of a cup of tea in Miss Mary's own room. "What's
bred in the bones comes out in the blood. I had a gift for cooking
since I was ten, and there's little I'll thank a French chef to tell
me, Miss Merry. But I can't impress the boarders. I never could. And
I can't get the work out o