"I don't know, I've been lucky, very lucky."
"Have you? When?"
"Well, once, down South, not so long ago. And I was lucky when I met you."
"Indeed it was I had the luck then."
"Indeed, I had. If you could have seen the awful room, Kathleen, that Miss Jones sent me to look at! In a cheap boarding house, and with a landlady who looked as though she would cheat you half the time and scold you the other half."
"That would have been a happy home to return to when you'd been out at night to see two lovers parted only to meet again! Now, sit where you are. The cook doesn't wash the dishes."
"No, but she dries them," Hertha said decisively; and together they cleared away the things.
"I'd give a penny to know your thoughts," Kathleen remarked as she wrung out the dishcloth and hung it up to dry.
Hertha did not answer. She was pulling a leaf from the geraniums, crushing it in her fingers. She had left the lovers of the play and was back in an orange grove, her own lover close to her side. "You are Snowdrop of the fairy tale," he was saying. It had come true, she was Snowdrop, and yet of her own will she had destroyed the fairy tale. Whom might he not be making love to now? All at once she felt homesick and very tired.
Perhaps Kathleen a little guessed her thoughts. "It must be slow enough for you here with nobody but an old maid around like me. I wish I knew a fine young fellow to ask to dinner on Sunday."