Sylvie's voice trembled with the effort and excitement of telling her money and housekeeping troubles.
"Sometimes I think we ought to have a cheaper girl; but I have just as much as I can do,—of those kinds of work,—and a poor girl would waste everything if I left her to go on. And I don't know much, myself. If Sabina were to go,—and she will next spring,—I am afraid it would turn out that we should have to keep two."
For all Sylvie's little "afternoons out," it was very certain that she, and Sabina also, did have their hands full at home. It is wonderful how much work one person, who does none of it and who must live fastidiously, can make in a small household. From Mrs. Argenter's hot water, and large bath, and late breakfast in the morning to her glass of milk at nine o'clock at night, which she never could remember to carry up herself from the tea-table,—she needed one person constantly to look after her individual wants. And she couldn't help it, poor lady, either; that is the worst of it; one gets so as not to be able to help things; "it was the shape of her head," Sabina said, in a phrase she had learned of the cabinet-maker.
"You shall have anything you can do; just as Dot does," said Miss Euphrasia. "And Amy will like it all the better for your doing. You can put the love into the work, as much as we shall into the pay."
Was there ever anybody who handled the bare facts of life so graciously as this Miss Euphrasia? She did it by taking right hold of them, by their honest handles,—as they were meant to be taken hold of.
"You like your home? You haven't grown tired of being a village girl?" she said, as she and Sylvie sat down on a great flat projecting rock in the shaded walk beside the railroad track. They had just missed one car; there would not be another for twenty minutes.
"O, yes. No; I haven't got tired; but I don't feel as if I had quite been it, yet. I don't think I am exactly that, or anything, now. That is the worst of it. People don't understand. They won't take us in,—all of them. It's just as hard to get into a village, if you weren't born in it, as it is to get into upper-ten-dom. Mrs. Knoxwell called, and looked round all the time with her nose up in a sort of a way,—well, it was just like a dog sniffing round for something. And she went off and told about mother's poor, dear, old, black silk dress, that I made into a cool skirt and jacket for her. 'Some folks must be always set up in silk, she sposed.' Everybody isn't like the Ingrahams."
"No garment of this life fits exactly. There was only one seamless robe. But we mustn't take thought for raiment, you see. The body is more. And at last,—somehow, sometime,—we shall be all clothed perfectly—with his righteousness."
This was too swift and light in its spiritual touching and linking for Sylvie to follow. She had to ask, as the disciples did, for a meaning.
"It isn't clothes that I am thinking of, or that trouble me; or any outside. And I know it isn't actual clothes you mean. Please tell me plainer, Miss Euphrasia."