"'T ain't no use. She won't come."
"Well, go and ask her. I was told to come here to look for board and lodging."
He glanced inquiringly at the man on the porch, who, engrossed in the local paper, was apparently oblivious of the conversation at the gate.
"She won't come 'cause she's washin' the rest of us," returned the boy, as he swung himself to the ground, "thar're six of us an' she ain't done but two. That's Lemmy she's got hold of now. Can't you hear him holler?"
He planted his feet squarely on the board walk, looked back at Ordway over his shoulder, and departed reluctantly with the message for his mother. At the end of a quarter of an hour, when Ordway had entered the gate and sat down in the cold wind on the front steps, the door behind him opened with a jar, and a large, crimson, untidy woman, splashed with soapsuds, appeared like an embodied tempest upon the threshold.
"Canty says you've come to look at the dead gentleman's room, suh," she began in a high voice, approaching her point with a directness which lost none of its force because of the panting vehemence with which she spoke.
"Baxter told me I might find board with you," explained Ordway in her first breathless pause.
"To be sure he may have the dead gentleman's room, Mag," put in the man on the porch, folding his newspaper, with a shiver, as he rose to his feet.
"I warn't thinkin' about lettin' that room agin'," said Mrs. Twine, crushing her husband's budding interference by the completeness with which she ignored his presence. "But it's jest as well, I reckon, for a defenceless married woman to have a stranger in the house. Though for the matter of that," she concluded in a burst of domestic confidence, "the woman that ain't a match for her own husband without outside help ain't deservin' of the pleasure an' the blessin' of one." Then as the man with the red nose slunk shamefacedly into the passage, she added in an undertone to Ordway, "and now if you'll jest step inside, I'll show you the spare room that I've got to let."
She led the way indoors, scolding shrilly as she passed through the hall, and up the little staircase, where several half-dressed children were riding, with shrieks of delight, down the balustrade. "You needn't think you've missed a scrubbing because company's come," she remarked angrily, as she stooped to box the ears of a small girl lying flat on her stomach upon the landing. "Such is my taste for cleanness," she explained to Ordway, "that when my hands once tech the soap it's as much as I can do to keep 'em back from rubbin' the skin off. Thar 're times even when the taste is so ragin' in my breast that I can hardly wait for Saturday night to come around. Yet I ain't no friend to license whether it be in whiskey or in soap an' water. Temperance is my passion and that's why, I suppose, I came to marry a drunkard."