'Why?' I demanded.
Oh, heaps of reasons, gave a few, hadn't a clean nightie, for one thing, she had only two and had been too ill to wash the other. She had so hoped there would have been some in the last parcel from the Charitable Clothing Fund.
'But I have simply dozens,' I wailed. Yes, I know, there wasn't an ounce of tact in that remark, but I was thinking of my own luxurious room, fires every night, all the pettings and scoldings I get if I'm not well, and how nobody asks me if I will have the doctor or takes the slightest notice of me if I say I won't, and of all the clothes I'd got and the general and disgusting air of affluence there is about the family. I hated myself and all my relatives. Yes, I did, the whole blessed lot of them.
'But I couldn't leave my husband,' said Mrs Williams.
'Of course, he's coming too, my spare room is crying out for visitors.'
'But we are strangers, you can't take us in like this.'
'But it was "a stranger and ye took Me in," He said. Oh,' I continued, throwing grammar to the winds, 'why didn't He tell a person what to do when the stranger won't be took in.'
She laughed at that and then consented. So I flew home and told the tale to Ross and Nannie in the nursery.
'Poor young thing,' said Nannie, 'but she'll soon get better here.' So I sent the Gidger flying to the Titmouse for heaps of flowers, and the S.P. scuttling round to get the spare room ready for her and the dressing-room for him, and the Stench off on a bicycle to ask the doctor to look in, and 'My 'Ilda' for a cab. After that I said to Nannie, 'Come and help me look out some things for her, nighties and something pretty to sit up in.'
And then I turned to my brother, who was sitting silently.