"Please, miss, her ladyship would like to know where you would prefer the packing-cases put."
"Oh, couldn't you bring them up here?" Jasmine asked eagerly. "That is, of course," she added, "if it isn't too much trouble."
The maid protested that it would be no trouble at all; but her looks belied her speech.
"And if you could bring them up at once," added Jasmine quickly, "I should be very much obliged."
She had a plan in her head for softening her relatives, the successful carrying out of which involved having the crates in her room. After a few minutes they arrived.
"I'm afraid I can't open them with my umbrella," she said. She was not being facetious, for in her impetuousness she had tried, and broken the umbrella. "I wonder if you could find me a screw-driver?"
"Oh yes, miss, I daresay I could find a screw-driver."
"And a hammer," shouted Jasmine, rushing out of her room to the landing and calling down the stairs to the housemaid.
"I think I shall change my frock all the same," she decided. "Or at any rate I shall unpack; because if I don't unpack now, I shall never unpack."
In order not to lose the inspiration, Jasmine began to unpack with such rapidity that presently the room looked like the inside of a clothes-basket. Then she undressed with equal rapidity, mixing up washed clothes with unwashed clothes in her efforts to find a clean chemise. She found several chemises, but by this time it was impossible to say which or if any of them were clean, and when the housemaid came back with the screw-driver and the hammer, she spoke to her with Southern politeness: