Sylvia asked why.
“Why, it’s nothing but a common lodging-house in my opinion. The woman who keeps it—lady she calls herself—tries to kid you as they’re all paying guests. And the cats! You may like cats. I don’t. Besides I’ve been used to company where I’ve been in service, and the only company you get here is beetles. If any one goes down into the kitchen at night it’s like walking on nutshells, they’re so thick.”
“I haven’t come about the place,” Sylvia explained. “I want to see Mrs. Meares herself.”
“Oh, a friend of hers. I’m sorry, I’m shaw,” said the servant, “but I haven’t said nothing but what is gospel truth, and I told her the same. You’d better come up to the droring-room—well, droring-room! You’ll have to excuse the laundry, which is all over the chairs because we had the sweep in this morning. A nice hullabaloo there was yesterday! Fire-engines and all. Mrs. Meares was very upset. She’s up in her bedroom, I expect.”
The servant lit the gas in the drawing-room and, leaving Sylvia among the outspread linen, went up-stairs to fetch Mrs. Meares, who shortly afterward descended in a condition of dignified bewilderment and entered the room with one arm arched like a note of interrogation in cautious welcome.
“Miss Scarlett? The name is familiar, but—?”
Sylvia poured out her story, and at the end of it Mrs. Meares dreamily smoothed her brow.
“I don’t quite understand. Were you a girl dressed as a boy then or are you a boy dressed as a girl now?”
Sylvia explained, and while she was giving the explanation she became aware of a profound change in Mrs. Meares’s attitude toward her, an alteration of standpoint much more radical than could have been caused by any resentment at the behavior of Monkley and her father. Suddenly Sylvia regarded Mrs. Meares with the eyes of Clara, or of that new servant who had whispered to her in the hall. She was no longer the bland and futile Irishwoman of regal blood; the good-natured and feckless creature with open placket and draperies trailing in the dust of her ill-swept house; the soft-voiced, soft-hearted Hibernian with a gentle smile for man’s failings and foibles, and a tear ever welling from that moist gray eye in memory of her husband’s defection and the death of her infant son. Sylvia felt that now she was being sized up by some one who would never be indulgent again, who would exact from her the uttermost her girlhood could give, who would never forget the advantage she had gained in learning how desperate was the state of Sylvia Scarlett, and who would profit by it accordingly.
“It seems so peculiar to resort to me,” Mrs. Meares was saying, “after the way your father treated me, but I’m not the woman to bear a grudge. Thank God, I can meet the blows of fortune with nobility and forgive an injury with any one in the world. It’s lucky indeed that I can show my true character and offer you assistance. The servant is leaving to-morrow, and though I will not take advantage of your position to ask you to do anything in the nature of menial labor, though to be sure it’s myself knows too well the word—to put it shortly, I can offer you board and lodging in return for any little help you may give me until I will get a new servant. And it’s not easy to get servants these days. Such grand ideas have they.”