ab of pity that went through me.

_Monday the Twenty-sixth_

The rush is on, and Dinky-Dunk is always out before six. If it's true,
as some one once said, that the pleasures of life depended on its
anxieties, then we ought to be a hilarious household. Every one is busy,
and I do what I can to help. I don't know why it is, but I find an odd
comfort in the thought of having another woman near me, even Olga. She
also helps me a great deal with the housework. Those huge hands of hers
have a dexterity you'd never dream of. She thinks the piano a sort of
miracle, and me a second miracle for being able to play it. In the
evening she sits back in a corner, the darkest corner she can find, and
listens. She never speaks, never moves, never expresses one iota of
emotion. But in the gloom I can often catch the animal-like glow of her
eyes. They seem almost phosphorescent. Dinky-Dunk had a long letter from
Percival Benson to-day. It was interesting and offhandedly jolly and
just the right sort. And Percy says he'll be back on the Titchborne
place in a few weeks.

_Wednesday the Twenty-eighth_

Olga went through the boards of her wagon-box and got a bad scrape on
her leg. She showed me the extent of her injuries, without the slightest
hesitation, and I gave her first-aid treatment with my carbolated
vaseline. And still again I had to think of the Venus de Milo, for it
was a knee like a statue's, milky white and round and smooth, with a
skin like a baby's, and so different to her sunburnt forearms. It was
Olympian more than Fifth-Avenuey. It was a leg that made me think, not
of Rubens, but of Titian, and my thoughts at once went out to the
right-hand lady of the "Sacred and Profane Love," in the Borghese, there
was such softness and roundness combined with its strength. And
Dinky-Dunk walked in and stood staring at it, himself, with never so
much as a word of apology. Olga looked up at him without a flicker of
her ox-like eyes. It wasn't until I made an angry motion for her to
drop her skirt that she realized any necessity for covering the Titian
knee. But again I felt that odd pang of jealousy needle through me as I
saw his face. At least I suppose it was jealousy, the jealousy of an
artful little Mona-Lisa minx who didn't even class in with the
demigods. When Olga was gone, however, I said to Dinky-Dunk: "Isn't
that a limb for your life?"

He merely said: "We don't grow limbs up here, Tabby. They're legs, just