"Ye see," she would explain, "it's awfu' easy to wash, and a bit wipe owre wi' soap an' watter is a' it needs."
"My, how weel aff ye are!" one woman would exclaim, "I'm telt that ye maunna use a scrubbin' brush on't, or the pattern will rub off."
"Oh, ay," Nellie would laugh with a hint of superior wisdom in it. "Ye'll soon waste it gin ye took a scrubber to it. An' ye maunna use owre hot water to it either," she would add.
"Oh my!" would come in genuine surprise. "Do you tell me that. Eh, but you're the weel-aff woman now, to hae a room like that, an' rale waxcloth on the floor!"
"I thocht it was a fine, cheerie bit thing," Nellie would say. "It mak's the hoose ever so much mair heartsome."
"So it is," would come the reply. "It's a fine, but cheerie thing. You're a rale weel-aff woman, I can tell ye," and the woman would go home to dream of one day having a room like Mrs. Sinclair's, and to tell her neighbors of the great "grandeur" that the Sinclair's possessed, whilst Nellie would set to, and rub and polish those drawers and that mirror, and the stuff-bottomed chairs till they shone like the sun upon a moorland tarn, and she herself felt like dropping from sheer exhaustion.
She even took to telling the neighbors sometimes, when they came on those visits that "working folk should a' hae coal-houses, for coal kept ablow the beds makes an awfu' mess o' the ticks."
"Oh, weel," would be the reply, made with the usual sigh of resignation, "I hae had a house a gey lang while now, an' I dinna think I've ever wanted ony sic newfangled things as that."
"That's what's wrang," Mrs. Sinclair would reply. "We dinna want them. If we did, we'd soon get them. What way would the gentry hae a' thae things, an' us hae nane?"
"That's a' richt, Nellie," would be the reply. "We wadna ken what to do wi' what the gentry has got. They're rich an' can afford it, an' forby they need them an' we don't. I think I'm fine as I am."