"I don't think you could," answered Mary. "There are more things I should like to do for you than you would think to ask.—In fact," she added, looking round with a loving smile, "I don't know what I shouldn't like to do for you."
"My meaning was, that, as a thing of course, I should never ask you to do anything menial," explained Hesper, venturing a little further still, and now speaking in a tone perfectly matter-of-fact.
"I don't know what you intend by menial ," returned Mary.
Hesper thought it not unnatural she should not be familiar with the word, and proceeded to explain it as well as she could. That seeming ignorance may be the consequence of more knowledge, she had yet to learn.
"Menial , don't you know?" she said, "is what you give servants to do."
But therewith she remembered that Mary's help in certain things wherein her maid's incapacity was harrowing, was one of the hopes she mainly cherished in making her proposal: that definition of menial would hardly do.
"I mean—I mean," she resumed, with a little embarrassment, a rare thing with her, "—things like—like—cleaning one's shoes, don't you know?—or brushing your hair."
Mary burst out laughing.
"Let me come to you to-morrow morning," she said, "and I will brush your hair that you will want me to come again the next day. You beautiful creature! whose hands would not be honored to handle such stuff as that?"
As she spoke, she took in her fingers a little stray drift from the masses of golden twilight that crowned one of the loveliest temples in which the Holy Ghost had not yet come to dwell.