When, perforce, Hopeful demanded to clean the two front rooms, Miss Clergy would scold sharply, as she moved into one of them, waiting with added martyrdom until she could fly back into the other to complain about some minute change in the placing of a book or the position of a chair.
The rest of the house, however, was left to Hopeful’s guardianship, and, when she tried to persuade Miss Clergy to come downstairs and sit in the pleasant parlors or eat in the little breakfast room, Miss Clergy would demand,
“Do you want to find another home for yourself, Hopeful? Oh, you do not. Then leave me in peace—at least I am mistress of my own house.”
She never spoke to Ali Baba save the daily, “An hour’s drive, Ali Baba, not too fast,” and by the world at large she was never even seen. No charity appeal softened her selfish, useless vigil; no cause, however worthy, could lessen her hysterical mimicry of disease. No one was the better for the existence of that small, sinister person with a withered heart, since it was no longer even bruised.
And when, on the evening of the day Miss Clergy had stopped for the second time to hear Thurley sing, she rang the bell long after Hopeful had served her a tray supper and said almost civilly as she entered, “Sit down, Hopeful. I want to ask you about a girl named Thurley Precore who sings—who she is and how she earns her living and how long she has been here,” Hopeful put her tired hand to her head, wondering if she had heard aright.
With a tyrannical smile Miss Clergy repeated her questions.
So Hopeful found her voice after a bit and began the story of Thurley’s singing for her supper up to the time her father died when the first snow flew and how out of charity Betsey Pilrig had taken her into her home to live with Philena.
“Of course Betsey didn’t have much, but what she had she divided between Philena and Thurley, and she’s said to me that she looked on Thurley as the boy and Philena the girl. Because Thurley is one of those that’ll get themselves heard, if they’re born in the backwoods. There wasn’t much to Philena but her big eyes and her crutch, and you ought to have seen the way Thurley looked out for her and toted her on her back, pretending she wasn’t heavy! My land, I’ve watched those children play together until I was late with my work!”
“What did they play?” interrupted Miss Clergy.
“Missionary and play-actin’ and all such stuff, and Thurley made it up. No matter what Thurley made up, Philena said she liked it. I never will forget the Christmas Philena made a travellin’ chest for Thurley out of an ol’ tea-box she got down to Submit Curler’s store! She fitted it up inside with cretonne pockets and a lookin’ glass and wrote on a card, ‘For Thurley when she goes to be a missionary!’ Wasn’t that the queerest thing for a young ’un to think of? Philena was to be a missionary, too, and Thurley was to sing the songs. Oh, Thurley can sing! When they graduated from the high school—Philena didn’t live long after that—Philena read a graduating essay and Thurley sang a song and there wasn’t no applause for Philena, except what me and Betsey and Ali Baba mustered up, but everybody stamped their feet to have Thurley come back and sing. There was a sort of tableau, too, at the church, for Children’s Sunday—seven children were the seven days of the week, and wasn’t it queer that Thurley was Saturday, Philena was Sunday and Lorraine McDowell, Monday?”