“Will you please show me the way to the bath-room?” she said.
In a state of great agitation, Mrs. Parks went up the stairs after a few moments with a pail of hot water in one hand, a foot-tub in the other, and a bath towel over her arm.
“I’m awfully sorry,” she said, “but we haven’t a real bath-room. We or’to have one, I know, and mean to sometime, but I’ve brought you this,” and she put down the pail of hot water and the foot-tub. “There’s more in the range, and I hope you can make a sponge do. Miss Bennett does.”
Irene looked surprised, and said:
“No bath-room! How do you live without one, especially in summer? Yes, I suppose I can make that do. Please, what time do you dine?”
Again poor Mrs. Parks looked distressed. To dine at night was not on her programme, and she replied, apologetically and confusedly:
“We don’t dine in the country—nowhere except at the McPherson’s. We have tea at six, and dinner at noon sharp. We are particular about that on account of Miss Bennett, whose digester is out of kilter and has to have her meals reg’lar. Will the t’other one have a sponge, too?”
She nodded toward Rena, who was dashing cold water over her face and neck and arms, and who replied:
“No, thanks. I am doing very well.” To Irene, as soon as they were alone, she said: “Are you crazy? asking for a bath-room and dinner at night! When all your life at home you have had your dinner at noon and bathed in a tin basin or pail. Don’t drive that woman wild, or I shall certainly shriek out some day, ‘I am the Miss Burdick and she is only Irene!’”
She spoke lightly and laughingly, but Irene, who felt that she was in earnest, decided to come down from her stilts and conform to the customs of the house. She could not, however, divest herself of the grande duchesse manner, which was in a way natural to her, and no one would ever have suspected that the tall, queenly girl, who at about half-past five sailed into Mrs. Parks’ best room, looking as fresh as if she had bathed in the sea instead of a foot-tub, was not to the purple born and always accustomed to every luxury money could buy. Mrs. Parks was in the kitchen and Lottie and I were left to introduce ourselves, which we might have done awkwardly enough, if it had not been for Rena, who came up to me at once and said: