"I'm almost abnormally healthy and strong, you know, even if I look thin. I'm the wiry kind."
She sniffed at that, and then said, with a shrug:
"Oh, well, maybe you will escape. I'm sure I wish you better luck than mine. But one thing's certain: you'll lose that Canadian complexion of yours all right."
My duties, she said, would be explained to me by Mr. Campbell himself, though she was going to stay over a day or two to help break me in. My salary would be ten dollars a week and free board and lodging at the Myrtle Bank Hotel. I told her of the slighting reception I had received at the hands of Mr. Campbell, and she said:
"Oh, well, he's a crank. You couldn't please him, no matter what you did." Then she added: "I don't see, anyhow, why he objected to you. Brains aren't so much needed in a position like this as legs and a constitution of iron."
As the day advanced, the heat encroached. Miss Foster sat fanning herself languidly by the window, looking out with a far-away expression. I told her about my clothes, and how mortified I was to find them so different from those of the others on the boat. She said:
"You can have all my clothes, if you want. They won't do for Canada."
That suggested a brilliant solution of my problem of how I was to secure immediately suitable clothes for Jamaica. I suggested that as she was going to Canada, she could have mine, and I would take hers. The proposition seemed to give her a sort of grim amusement. She looked over my clothes. She took the woolen underwear and heavy, hand-knitted stockings (that Sung-Sung had made for an older brother, and which had descended to me after two sisters had had them!), two woolen skirts, my heavy overcoat, and several other pieces.
She gave me a number of white muslin dresses,—they seemed lovely to me,—an evening gown with a real low neck, cotton underwear, hose, etc.
I put my hair up for the first time that morning. As I curled it a bit, this was not difficult to do. I simply rolled it up at the back and held the chignon in place with four bone hair-pins that she gave me. I put on one of her white muslin dresses but it was so long for me that we had to make a wide tuck in it. Then I wore a wide Leghorn hat, the only trimming of which was a piece of cream-colored mull twisted like a scarf about the crown.