“I whitewashed it myself. The young gentlemen were so occupied with constructing the pavilion that I could not bear to interrupt them.” Nan and Douglas could not help smiling at the little English girl’s stilted language but they hid their amusement. “I prepared the attic room for the negro maid. Would you like to go up and see that?”
“Yes, indeed! Come on, Susan, and see your room. It is to be right up over Cousin Lizzie’s.”
“Well, praise be to my Maker that I ain’t goin’ to have to sleep in the air. My lungs is weak at best an’ no doubt the air would be the death of me.”
Susan’s figure belied her words, as she was an exceedingly buxom girl with a chest expansion that Sandow might have envied her.
The attic was entered by a trap door from the room below and in lieu of stairs there was nothing but a ladder made chicken-steps style: small cross pieces nailed on a board.
The attic room was scrubbed as clean as Miss Lizzie’s. The low ceiling and very small windows certainly suited Susan’s idea of sanitation, as very little air could find its way into the chamber. A rough wooden bed was built against the wall, as is often the way in mountain cabins, more like a low, deep shelf than a bed. Gwen had stuffed a new tick with nice clean straw and Susan bid fair to have pleasant dreams on her fresh bed. A night spent without dreams of some kind was one wasted in the eyes of the colored girl who consulted her dream book constantly.
Josh had railed at Gwen for putting a bunch of black-eyed Susans in the attic room.
“Waitin’ on a nigger! Humph! You uns ain’t called on to lower yo’sef that a way. Niggers is niggers an’ we uns would ruther to bust than fetch an’ carry fer ’em.”
“This seems a very small thing to do,” Gwen had answered. She did not share the mountaineer’s prejudice against the black race. “I have no doubt this girl will like flowers just as much as Miss Somerville.”
So she did and a great deal more, as she expressed her appreciation of the tomato can of posies, and Miss Somerville had not even noticed the bouquets in her room. As Susan followed the girls up the funny steps and her head emerged through the trap door, her eyes immediately fell on the flowers.