"For God's sake, Sally, what are you doing?" I demanded, and reaching out, as I swayed slightly, I caught the lintel of the door for support.
"I'm washing and George is splitting kindling wood," she replied cheerfully, shaking out the white, filmy stuff with an upward movement of her bare arms; "the boy who splits the wood never came—I think he ate too many currants yesterday—and if George hadn't offered his services as man of all work, I dread to think what you and Aunt Euphronasia would have eaten for supper."
"It's first-rate work for the muscles, Ben," remarked George, flinging an armful of wood on the brick floor, and kneeling beside the stove to kindle a fire in the old ashes. "I haven't a doubt but it's better for the back and arms than horseback riding. All the same," he added, poking vigorously at the smouldering embers, "I'm going to wallop that boy as soon as I've got this fire started."
"You won't have time to do that until you've delivered the day's washing," rejoined Sally, with merriment.
"Yes, I shall. I'll stop on my way—that boy comes first," returned George with a grim, if humorous, determination.
This humour, this lightness, and above all this gallantry, which was so much a part of the older civilisation to which they belonged, wrought upon my disordered nerves with a feeling of anger. Here, at last, I had run against that "something else" of the Blands', apart from wealth, apart from position, apart even from blood, of which the General had spoken. Miss Mitty might go in rags and do her own cooking, he had said, but as long as she possessed this "something else," that supported her, she would preserve to the end, in defiance of circumstances, her terrible importance.
"You know I don't care a bit what I eat, Sally!" I blurted out, in a temper.
"Well, you may not, dear, but George and I do," she rejoined, pinning the white stuff on a clothes-line she had stretched between the door and the window, "we are both interested, you see, in getting you back to work. There's the door-bell, George. You may wash your hands at the sink and answer it. If it's the butter, bring it to me, and if it's a caller, let him wait, while I turn down my sleeves."
Rising from his knees, George washed his hands at the sink, and went out along the brick walk to the house, while I stood in the doorway, under the shadow of the pink crape myrtle, and made a vow in my heart.
"Sally," I said at last in the agony of desperation, "you ought to have married George."