“Ah, now, let her!” Hannah struck in unexpectedly. “If you break your back over them tubs, you’ll be groaning all night and spoiling my rest.”
“Well, if you’re sure you can do ’em in an hour,” Sallie hesitated.
“Surest thing I do!” cried Jacqueline, all smiles. “Let me get at ’em right away.”
Eagerly she capered at Sallie’s heels up the back stairs. Above was a long hall with doors at either side, just the sort of hall that Jacqueline had expected to find in Aunt Eunice’s house. Sallie pushed open one of the doors, and led the way into a room that was all cool gray and leaf-green with here and there, in hangings and in wall-paper, a flash of canary yellow.
“This is the little girl’s room you was askin’ for,” said Sallie. “Don’t you touch nothin’ now. Here’s the bathroom, and t’other one is cross the hall.”
“All right,” Jacqueline answered stiffly. She didn’t at all like the insinuation that she would touch things. “Give me the cleaning rags, and I’ll go to it.”
For a moment Sallie lingered, until she was sure that Jacqueline was attacking the nickel and enamel in a professional manner. Then with a parting hint that Jacqueline would have to work fast, if she expected to finish in an hour, she went away downstairs, and Jacqueline was left in possession of the second story.
She had no time to feel lonely in those empty rooms. She was too busy to think. She scrubbed and she polished, while the perspiration ran down her face, and her fingers grew stiff and gritty from the soap and the coarse powder that she used. When she rose at last, and looked down at the shining tub and the clean tiling of the floor, she felt some sympathy with poor Sallie. She too, had a “crick in her back.”
Through the open door into the bedroom she glimpsed the green and gold of the chintz curtains, the dressing-table, with its lady pin-cushion and its dainty china boxes, the comfortable, low rocker beside the well-filled bookshelves. So that was Caroline’s room—the room that rightfully was hers!
Smiling somewhat ruefully, Jacqueline tiptoed across the threshold and, planted on the oyster white rug, stood gazing about her. This might all have been hers—this soon would be hers. She would sleep in that cozy, soft bed, with no fretful children to disturb her. She would rise in the morning and dress. Her clothes would hang, no doubt, behind that door, which was all one mirror.