"I say I was one of his friends—but I never believed he did it—I mean how could he, and why should he?"
"Perhaps you wrote to tell him you believed in him!"
"I wish I had," said the girl, "but I thought everybody would, and then you know we had a sort of a misunderstanding; and I was going to, and then my father's troubles got so bad that he couldn't hide them from me, and we used to talk them over all night sometimes, and I couldn't think about anybody else's troubles.—Is he up there all alone?"
"There's the last hook. And now I'll draw a tub."
Miss Joy undressed herself to the music of water roaring under high pressure into a deep porcelain tub. She was no longer hungry, for she had had a glass of milk on arriving at the hotel, but she was very tired and a little dizzy in her head.
As is the custom with girls who have been brought up with maids to dress and undress them, she flung her clothes upon a chair in a disorderly heap, and was no more embarrassed at being naked before Martha than if Martha had been a piece of furniture.
"Come and talk to me, Martha," she said, "while I soak."
So Martha sat by the tub as by a bedside, and Miss Joy with a sigh of comfort lay at length in the hot water and they talked.
"Is he up there all alone?"
"He is now. The housework was too heavy for one old woman. He sent me to New York to find a helper. But the wages don't make up for the loneliness in the young biddy's mind—in what she is plazed to call her mind—and I'm five days lookin' about and nothing done."