"To avoid election frauds. You see there is so much deviltry right now in politics that the law-enforcement faction is sending men around all over the city to find out every voter, and if he has the right to vote."
"Well, what good does it all do?"
"None; but it gives the poor, overworked housewives one more trip to the front door, in the course of the day.—Then there are agents selling non-rustible wired bust-forms. Pearl never knows what to say to them, either."
"Mercy, what should one say?" I demanded, thinking all of a sudden that maybe my task was going to be too large for me.
"Say anything that comes to your mind, just so it's unfit for publication—nothing milder will do for them," she answered bitterly.
"And Waterloo doesn't give you any trouble while you're trying to work, does he?" I inquired.
"Happily no, for Grapefruit is his consolation and his joy. Never were there such ways of a nursemaid with a man child. Never has anybody invented such tales and games—"
"And spitting contests," I interpolated.
"It's true she taught him that ugly habit," she responded with some dignity, "but all boys learn it sooner or later."
So I stayed and the book grew like a soap-bubble the first week. Then Pearl's brother got into that condition which is always described by our colored servants with much gusto and rolling of white eyeballs as "'bout ter die," and, whether he ever dies or not, is a matter that the housekeeper knows nothing of. But the servant always leaves, and she did in this case; and upon the Sunday morning thereafter the gas stove in the Clayborne home looked as if gangrene had set in on it. I had magnanimously insisted on doing the cooking; and I didn't know before that a gas stove had to be washed as often as a new-born baby.