"It's very nice in her," said the elder sister. "I suppose the Paytons have lost their money and she has to support the family."
"She is certainly capable," Miss Mary admitted. "But it does seem strange for her to work in this way, when she could give music lessons, for instance."
"Perhaps she's not musical," Miss Eliza objected. "I hate to have a girl pounding the piano, when her talent lies in scrubbing floors." Miss Eliza Graham looked like a frayed old eagle; perhaps because for seventy years she had flapped unavailing wings against the Graham traditions.
Those traditions had kept her from the serious study of music, and later they had "saved" her from marriage with a man who had very little money. The younger Miss Graham looked, and was, as contented as a pouter-pigeon teetering about in a comfortable barn-yard. It was Miss Eliza, tall, thin, piercing-eyed, and sweet-hearted at seventy-two, who had, as she expressed it, "dug Mary up," and brought her to town for the winter. Miss Eliza was for a hotel, but Miss Mary felt that unmarried ladies should have the dignity of their own roof. "We can always have the escort of a messenger-boy, if we go out in the evening," she told her sister, who agreed, her eyes twinkling.
"Excellent idea. We can spank him if he doesn't behave properly!"
"Oh, my dear Eliza!" Miss Mary protested, but she smiled indulgently. Eliza was the most precious thing in the world to the little, plump lady who made endless excuses to herself, and to everybody else, for "dear Eliza's ways." It was a "way" of Eliza's to forgive Youth for almost anything it did....
"Of course, Youth makes Age uncomfortable," she would concede. "New wine is very hard on old bottles! But if the bottles burst, it isn't the fault of the wine, it is the fault of the bottles—for having been empty!" The significance of those last words was quite lost on Miss Mary.
As the two sisters went over their little apartment, and discovered its possibilities, old Miss Eliza's interest centered in the youth as well as the sex of their real-estate agent. "Look at that wood-box!" she said;—"to think of a girl having so much gumption!"
"Oh, dear!" said Miss Mary—and pointed a shrinking finger at the stub of a cigarette on the parlor windowsill, "I thought I smelt smoke; a workman must have left it."
But the cigarette was the only fly in the ointment. The apartment, with its "art" finishings, electricity, and steam-heat, was to the country ladies and their one elderly maidservant a miracle of beauty and convenience.