“Lor bless you, ma’am, it ain’t the rubbin’ with clothes like your’n, it’s the rinsin’, and the washin’ in plenty of water—many ov ’em stuff the tub just full of clothes as they can pack, and then puddle them all through in a little water one side the tub, when it’s just as easy to have a few bits in at a time. Then when they’re a bilin’, the biler’s chuck full, and no room for ’em to scald; and they’re put right out of the bilin’ suds into the blue rinse water, ’stead ov bein’ suddled first.”
“What is suddled?”
“Well, just being put into a tub ov clear or near clear water, an’ gettin’ the soap out of ’em; then they kin be tossed into the rinse.”
“You think, then, it’s not the labor, but the water?”
“Stan’s to reason, if the cloes come out of thick water,—I don’t mean dirty; your cloes wouldn’t make dirty water if you was to try,—they’ll look thick.”
This was a great thing for Molly to know. She saw the principle of it, and she knew Marta grudged no work; it was only that she did not expend it in the right direction. Less rubbing, but more water, then, was no doubt the secret.
With ironing she learned less, Mrs. Hall’s views on the matter being of the Bunsby kind. Molly had been reading all she could find in books about it, but she believed a few words from a practical laundress would enlighten her more than much reading. She had only one clear idea herself; and that was that the most beautiful laundry-work she had ever seen, she had been told, was due to long boiling of the starch.
“I boil it till it runs off the spoon like melted silver,” the woman who did it told her.
“What do you think about starch? Ought it to be long boiled?” she asked Mrs. Hall.
“Oh, I don’t know. Some says so, some says not, but I never makes no differ; if I’m not ready the starch biles, if I am, it don’t. It’s all in the ironin’, I say; if you kin iron, you kin.”