"You're not going back to bed?"
"Rather not!" Georgiana's smile strove to be tolerant. "There are just a few things to be done about the house, and they are best done before breakfast. Off with you, lady cousin!"
"Do you always get up so early?" Jeannette persisted.
"I have an extraordinary fondness for early rising," Georgiana explained. "It's foolish, of course, but it's an old habit. Good-bye, my dear; my next errand is down cellar," and she vanished from the sight of her guest, quite unable to keep herself longer in hand before the amazing point of view of this daughter of luxury.
The "next errand" was the washing of the handful of fine towels with which the painstaking hostess was keeping the guest-room supplied, unwilling to furnish the aristocratic young person upstairs with the coarser articles used by herself and the others. Jeannette, all unaware that the snowy linen with which her room was kept plentifully supplied was constantly relaundered in secret by Georgiana's own hands, was as lavish in her use of it as she was accustomed to be at home, and the result was a quite unbelievable amount of extra work for her cousin.
Mr. Warne, coming upon his daughter by chance in this very early morning flurry of laundering, expressed himself upon the subject in the gentle but positive way which was his.
"Why do it, my dear?" he questioned. "Are the sheets and towels we use not quite good enough for others?"
"Not half good enough for Lady Jean," responded the laundress, rubbing energetically away—yet carefully, too, for the old linen was not so stout as it once had been.
"You are intentionally deceiving her, aren't you, daughter? Why do that?—since it is not necessary for her comfort."
"But it is. She would shudder at the touch of a cotton sheet. As for a common huck towel——"