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“‘The worst of it is,’ she says to me, Katy related, ‘the worst of all is, while I believe he ought to do what the men want rather than keep up the strike, I don’t really feel sure they ought to want him to do it. It’s so hard on the outside men.’ Oh, she’s got some sense straying about her, though it’s mainly lost to view. But I do wish she could make it up with her beau. He ain’t been ’round for a week; and when folks ain’t got a meat diet they can’t stand the strain of being crossed in love!”

Even Katy’s Celtic loyalty was staggered the next week. She came over on a perfectly needless borrowing errand to tell me.

“Did you see it, ma’am? Being my afternoon out, I wasn’t there. Did you see that woman tumble down on our grass and herself run out with Amos and Mrs. Kane?” (Mrs. Kane was the laundress, who acted also as scrubwoman once a week, Nellie’s health not being equal to the weekly cleaning required in a tidy household.) “Did you see it? I began to sniff the minute I struck the hall. My word! I knowed it. Then I begun to hear the groans– ‘O-o-ah! O-o-ah!’ mumbling, grumbling kind of groans–I didn’t need anything more to get next to that situation, no, ma’am. Mrs. Kane come tumbling down-stairs. You know her, Miss Patsy, Tim Kane’s widow, a fair-to-middling laundress and next door to a fool about everything else. Jest the kind that gits a good husband like Timothy and then fools away the money he leaves her and has to come on the wash tub. Down-stairs she comes–wild! The poor woman, they’d seen her fall outside, and Miss Mercy and she’d taken her in on a mattress with Amos to help; Amos wanted to call the amberlance, but Miss Mercy said no, they’d take her to the police; so they three took the poor creature into the house. And ‘Oh, hear her groan!’ I said, yes, she was easy to hear. I guess Amos felt all right; but you know niggers are biddable, and whatever they think, the creatures do like they’re told.

“Well, I walked up-stairs. She was there in the guest chamber on one of the twin beds with the flowery card, ‘Sleep gently in this quiet room,’ etcetery, over the towsledest head and sech skirts! She’d been having a time for sure. Herself had put a wet ice bandage on the woman’s head and a hot-water bag to her feet, and she was a-laying her hands, her own pretty, soft, little, white, trembling hands, to her awful shoes, but says I :

“‘You stop ! Don’t you tech her!’

“‘I must,’ says she; ‘they’re soaked.’

“‘Don’t you see what’s the matter of her?’ say I. ‘She’s dead drunk!’

“I reckoned she’d deny it. Not a bit. ‘I suppose so,’ says she; ‘that’s why I wouldn’t let them call the amberlance.’

“‘And do you mean to keep her here ?’ says I. ‘That drunken rubbish?’

“Well, she does; she was awful sorry for the trouble to us, but the woman fell down at her door, and she was in dire misery, and Miss Mercy she felt she had got to take her in. My word, Miss Patsy, I had to shet my teeth a minute to keep back my feelings, but every word I said was: ‘I guess you better move that other bed out and then you can burn this one!’ Heavens, I ain’t going to describe the next hour till the doctor come. Now, she’s laying comfortable in the doctor’s gown, in that nice clean bed, and I’ve made her chicken broth and mustard plasters and everything else for her comfort.

“When the doctor come, she said, ‘This goes the limit,’ and then she bit off the rest and swallered it and said, ‘We’ll have to scrub her.’ And we did–with washing powder and scouring soap. I hope it hurt, but I’m ‘fraid it didn’t.”