I have made
almost everything that Garda and I have worn, of course; I braid the
palmetto hats we both wear; I have dyed and patched and turned and
darned--oh! you haven't a conception! Some of the table-cloths are
nothing _but_ darns. I could put in myself the new panes of glass, after
they were once bought. And, every month or two, I have had to mend the
roof, to keep it from leaking; generally I did that at sunrise, but I
have done it, too, on moonlight nights, late, when no one was likely to
come. Then, every single day, I have had to begin all over again with
Pablo and Raquel. Three times every week I have had to go out myself and
stand over Pablo to see that he did as I wished about the orange-trees.
Always the very same things; but we have been at it in this way for
years! Every day of my life I have had to go out and see with my own
eyes whether Raquel had wiped off the shelves; three hundred and
sixty-five times each year, for seventeen years, she has pretended to
forget it."

She lay silent, as if reviewing it all. "Perhaps I have been
over-thorough," she resumed. "But somehow I couldn't help it,
thoroughness has always been my mania. It has taken me to great
lengths--I see it now; it has made burdens where there needn't have been
any. Still, I couldn't have helped it, Margaret; I really don't think I
could. After sweeping, I always used to go down on my hands and knees
and dust the carpets with a cloth. And I used to pick up every seed that
Dick, my canary, had dropped. Dear little Dick, how I cried when he
died!--he was the last northern thing I had left; yet, would you believe
it? I pretended I didn't care for him, that I was tired of his singing.
I pretended I preferred the mocking-birds. Mocking-birds!" repeated
Melissa Whiting, with whispered but scathing contempt.

She came back to the subject of her thoroughness when Margaret paid her
next visit. "It has been a hard task-master; I have been thinking it
over," she said. "Still, without it, should I have got on as well even
as I have? I don't believe I should. Take the way I have made myself
over--made myself a Thorne. I couldn't have lived here at all as I was,
there was no room for Melissa Whiting. I saw that; and so, while I was
about it, I made the change complete. Oh yes, I was very complete! I
swallowed everything. I even swallowed slavery,--I, a New England
girl,--what do you say to that?--a New England girl, abolitionist to the
core! It was the