"You're a damned religious beast to be livin' in a cowshed," said one of the tramps.
One day Gourock Ellen asked me who did my washing, though I believe that she knew I washed my own clothes with my own hands.
"Myself," I said in reply to Ellen's inquiry.
"Will yer own country girls not do it for you?"
"I can do it myself," I replied.
When I looked for my soiled under-garments a week later I could not find them. I made inquiries and found that Gourock Ellen had washed them for me.
"It's a woman's work," she said, when I talked to her, and she washed my clothes to the end of the season and would not accept payment for the work.
Nearly everyone in the squad looked upon the two women with contempt and disgust, and I must confess that I shared in the general feeling. In my sight they were loathsome and unclean. They were repulsive in appearance, loose in language, and seemingly devoid of any moral restraint or female decency. It was hard to believe that they were young children once, and that there was still unlimited goodness in their natures. Why had Gourock Ellen handed the potatoes to the old Mayo man who was hungry, and why had she undertaken to do my washing without asking for payment? I could not explain these impulses of the woman, and sometimes, indeed, I cannot explain my own. I cannot explain why I then disliked Gourock Ellen, despite what she had done for me, and to-day I regret that ignorance of youth which caused me to despise a human being who was (as after events proved) infinitely better than myself.