She held a fresh towel in her hand, which he eyed with glancing suspicion.
"I got to thinking," explained his wife. "Perhaps she's used to having a clean towel every morning, too."
The minister compressed his lips almost imperceptibly as she went to her sister's door, the towel over her arm. Hilda, with the pitcher of water, arrived at the same moment, so that mother and daughter stood with their respective burdens on Aunt Marjie's threshold, and even spoke together, like rival hucksters proclaiming their wares.
"Gracious!" cried the favoured lady, opening her door and accepting the alms. "Such magnificent service! Anna," she added, "don't you let me put you out. I can easily live on the view. You really don't know what this means, after being cooped up in a place like Tahulamaji!"
Miss Whitcom was tall, and rather fine looking. She was a trifle taller, for instance, than her brother-in-law, and had a way, when any discussion with him was in progress, of standing up quite close to the minister, so that she created the illusion, a little, of towering over him. She was not, of course, actually a great deal taller, but how one could make the sly inch count at such times! Her sister looked almost dumpy beside her.
"I suppose," observed Mrs. Needham, "you do feel kind of cooped up in those foreign places." That phrase of hers "foreign places," was in the nature of a stock term. It was expansive, elastic, comprehensive. She spoke of foreign places a little as her husband spoke of the East or of "culture." Neither had travelled any to speak of. In a sort of whimsical way it seemed to Mrs. Needham that one might expect to find Bombay and Peking supporting much the same conditions of life. Or even Dublin and Rome, for that matter. "I don't suppose," she added, "there's anything like this where you've been."
"I should emphatically say not," her sister assured her. "At Rato-muh—that's the capital, you know—we've nothing but a dirty little river. I'm dying for a glorious swim!"
"We go bathing nearly every afternoon, Aunt Marjie," Hilda announced.
"You do? Well, I'm with you!" She was just a trifle loud. "Do there happen to be any convenient islands one could swim out to?"