"Didn't you tell him, Martha dear, that you nursed me till I was able to walk?"
"Shoor I did! An' it's the livin' truth. What's the matter with that? Believe me, you wasn't good for more than a minit or two more on your legs, when I got you into your bed that blessed night. You was clean bowled over, an' you couldn't 'a' walked another step if you'd been killed for it. Didn't I nurse you them days you was in bed, helplesslike as a baby? Didn't I nurse you till you could walk?"
"Indeed you did. And that's precisely the point!" said Claire. "If Mr. Ronald—if Mrs. Sherman knew the truth, that I was poor, homeless, without a friend in New York the night you picked me up on the street, and carried me home and cared for me without knowing a thing about me, they mightn't—they wouldn't have taken me into their house and given me their little boy to train. And because they wouldn't, I want to tell them. I want to square myself. I ought to have told them long ago. I want—"
"You want 'em to bounce you," observed Mrs. Slawson calmly. "Well, there's always more'n one way of lookin' at things. For instance any good chambermaid, with experience, will tell you there's three ways of dustin'. The first is, do it thora, wipin' the rungs o' the chairs, an' the backs o' the pictures, an' under the books on the table like. The second is, just sorter flashin' your rag over the places that shows, an' the third is—pull down the shades. They're all good enough ways in their own time an' place, an' you foller them accordin' to your disposition or, if you're nacherelly particular, accordin' to the other things you got to do, in the time you got to do 'em in. Now, I'm particular. I'm the nacherelly thora kind, but if I'm pressed, an' there's more important things up to me than the dustin', I give it a lick an' a promise, same as the next one, an' let it go at that, till the time comes I can do better. Life's too short to fuss an' fidget your soul out over trifles. It ain't always what you want, but what you must. You sometimes got to cut short at one end so's you can piece out at another, an' you can take it from me, you only pester folks by gettin' 'm down where they can't resist you, an' forcin' a lot of hard facks down their throats, which ain't the truth anyhow, an' which they don't want to swaller on no account. What do they care about the machinery, so long as it turns out the thing they want? Believe me, it's foolishness to try to get 'em back into the works, pokin' about among the inside wheels an' springs, an' so forth. You likely get knocked senseless by some big thing-um-bob you didn't know was there. Now I know just eggsackly what's in your mind, but you're wrong. You think I told Mr. Ronald fibs. I didn't tell'm fibs. I just give'm the truth the way he'd take it, like you give people castor-oil that's too dainty to gullup it down straight. Some likes it in lemon, an' some in grobyules, but it's castor-oil all the same. He wanted to know the truth about you, an' I let him have it, the truth bein' you're as fine a lady as any in the land. If I'd happened to live in Grand Rapids at the time, I'd most likely of lived out with your grandmother, an' been an old family servant in your house like I was at Mrs. Granville's, an' I certainly would of nursed you if I'd had the chanct. It was just a case o' happenso, my not havin' it. The right kind o' folks here in New York is mighty squeamish about strangers. They want recommendations—they want 'em because they want to be sure the ones they engage is O.K. That's all recommendations is for, ain't it? Now I knew the minit I clapped eye to you, that, as I say, you was as grand a lady as any in the land, an' that bein' the case, what was the use o' frettin' because I hadn't more than your sayso to prove it. But if I'd pulled a long face to Mrs. Sherman, an' told her, hesitatin'-like an' nervous, about—well, about what took place that night, she, not havin' much experience of human nature (only the other kind that's more common here in New York City), she'd have hemmed, an' hawed, an' thought she'd better not try it, seein' Radcliffe is such an angel-child an' not to be trained except by a A-I Lady."
"But the truth," persisted Claire.
"I tell the truth," Mrs. Slawson returned with quiet dignity. "I only don't waste time on trifles."
"It is not wasting time on trifles to be exact and accurate. An architect planning a house must make every little detail true, else when the house goes up, it won't stand."
"Don't he have to reckon nothin' on the give or not-give of the things he's dealin' with?" demanded Martha. "I'm only a ignorant woman, an' I ask for information. When you're dress-makin' you have to allow for the seams, an' when you're makin'—well, other things, you have to do the same thing, only spelled a little different—you have to allow for the seems. Most folks don't do it, an' that's where a lot o' trouble comes in, or so it appears to me."
Claire twisted her ring in silence, gazing down at it the while as if the operation was, of all others, the most important and absorbing.
"We may not agree, Martha dear," she said at last, "but anyway I know you're good, good, good, and I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world."