sniffing at was a page of fashion cartoons,
curious human hieroglyphs that women can read and run to buy.
Highly improbable garments were sketched on utterly impossible
figures--female eels who could crawl through their own garters, eels
of strange mottlings, with heads like cranberries, feet like thorns,
and no spines at all.

Mrs. Nuddle was as opposite in every way as could be. She could not
have crawled through her own washtub if she had knocked the bottom out
of it. She was a caricature made by nature and long, hard work, and
she laughed at the caricatures devised by art in a hurry.

She was about to cast the paper aside as a final rebuke when she
caught sight of portraits of real people of fashion. They did not look
nearly so fashionable as the cartoons, but they were at least
possible. Some of them were said to be prominent in charity; most of
them were prominent out of their corsages.

Now Mrs. Nuddle sniffed at character, not at caricature. Leaning
against her washtub and wringer, both as graceful as their engineer,
she indulged herself in the pitiful but unfailing solace of the poor
and the ugly, which is to attribute to the rich dishonesty and to the
beautiful wickedness.

The surf Mrs. Nuddle had raised in the little private sea of her tub
had died down, and a froth of soap dried on the rawhide of her big
forearms as her heifer eyes roamed the newspaper-gallery of portraits.
One sudsy hand supported and suppressed her smile of ridicule. These
women, belles and swells, were all as glossy as if they had been
ironed.

Mrs. Nuddle sneered: "If the hussies would do an honest day's work it
would be better for their figgers." She was mercifully oblivious of
the fact that her tub-calisthenics had made her no more exquisite than
a cow in a kimono.

Mrs. Nuddle scorned the lily-fingered tulip-fleshed beauties. Their
sentimental alarms had nothing in common with her problem, which was
the riddle of a husband who was faithful only to the bottle, who was
indifferent to the children he got so easily, and was poetical only in
that he never worked save when the mood was on him.

Again Mrs. Nuddle made to cast aside the paper that had come into her
home wrapped round a bundle of laundry. But now she was startled, and
she would have startled anybody who might have been watching her, for
she stared hard at a photographed beauty and gasped:

"Sister!"

She in her disordered garb, unkempt, uncorseted, and uncommonly