Steenie moved forward, slowly, and greatly wondering. It had seemed all right to have gay young Suzan´ preside at her toilet, but a severe-looking and venerable creature like this was quite a different matter.
“Where is the bath-room, please?”
“The bath-room! There ain’t none. Hm-m. Did ye expect a palace?”
“A palace! I was talking ’bout water. What’ll I do then? I’ve been a’most a week in that dirty car—and I—Maybe Papa knows.” She applied at her father’s key-hole for advice, and he took the direction of affairs into his own hands.
“Just fix up a tub in your old wash-room, won’t you, Mary Jane? And let Steenie have her splash there. It will save messing your clean room, and I will explain to my mother.”
Mary Jane went away with a sniff, and her nose in the air; sternly muttering about “folks turning the house topsy-turvy, an’ thinkin’ the hull world b’longed to ’em;” and Steenie followed, meekly. She was very much in terror of the sharp-visaged old spinster, whose favor she had, however, unwittingly won by her desire for cleanliness; although Mary Jane was not the woman to admit that at once. She was shown into the bare-floored, and rather chilly wash-room, where a round blue tub was deposited upon the boards with a decided bang, and promptly partially filled with several buckets full of cold water from the “system” pump, after which Mary Jane disappeared.
Then the new-comer forgot her fear in her curiosity, and was busily poking about, inspecting her surroundings, when her ancient attendant re-entered, tossed another pail of boiling water into the previous ones of cold, and again withdrew.
An hour later, Steenie, very fresh and dainty in her white frock, and with her rebellious curls brushed into a semblance of order by her father’s untrained hand, bounded gayly through the long, cold halls, and in at the library door, just in time to overhear the old servant explaining to Madam: “She’ll be a cruel lot o’ trouble, an’ mebbe the death on us with her noise; but—she’s clean! Why, ma’am, she says she takes a hull body-wash, ever’ day on her life, an’ sometimes twicet! An’ if it’s the truth, she’s one youngun out of a million! an’ the only one ’t I ever see ’t liked water in her nateral state. She’s a phenomely. But—my floor! When I went in, half an hour arterwards, there she stood, dancin’ a reg’lar jig, roun’ an’ roun’, an’ splashin’ the suds all over her an’ the boards, an’ ever’ conceivable thing! I scairt her out, lively; an’ all she could say fer herself was: ‘It seemed so good an’ funny to use a roun’ tub, stidder a reg’lar long one.’ She’d a splotched out the last drop in another minute. She must a be’n brung up a reg’lar heathen, an’ her Mr. Dan’l’s only!”
Steenie, poised on tip-toe, listened to the close of the harangue; certain from the words that Mary Jane was frightfully angry and from the tone that she was rather pleased. But, at that moment, Madam Calthorp perceived her, and motioned silence to the speaker.
“But I’m not a heathen, Mary Jane! My father says a heathen is one who worships idols, an’ I wouldn’t be such a dunce as that. I’ve a whole lot of Indian idols at San’ Felisa, an’ they’re as ugly as ugly. The silly things make them out of the same clay they do their jars and dishes, an’ the jars are far prettier. My father says—”