Dan smiled. “I dare say Tamea is quite as happy as any Christian, Mrs. Pippy.”
“I do hope she’s clean, Mr. Pritchard.”
“Well, her people usually are. However, you might explain to her the mysteries of a modern bathtub. Do you think you and Julia can manage to dress her for dinner—after a fashion?”
Mrs. Pippy expressed the hope that the experiment might prove successful and suggested that Julia be interviewed.
Julia, a romantic, rosy-cheeked, imaginative but extremely plain woman in the early thirties, was overwhelmed with importance to discover that the master of the house had elected to lean upon her, to seek her advice and coöperation when confronted by this most unusual dilemma.
“An’ is it lady-in-waitin’ to a queen you’d ask me to be, Misther Pritchard? Faith, then, an’ I’ll defy you to find a body more willin’. Of course we’ll take care of her. Why shouldn’t we? Sure, ’tis sympathy an’ undhershtandin’ she’ll need this night. Where’s the poor lamb?”
For some reason not quite apparent to him, Dan had a feeling that Julia Hagerty was, beyond a doubt, the most wonderful woman he had ever met. Mrs. Pippy, he thought, had been overeducated and civilized and sheltered to the point where all the humanity had been squeezed out of her, while Julia, child of the soil, had, in the daily battle for bread and butter, been humanized to the point where she and Tamea could meet on something akin to common ground.
At that moment Tamea, having warmed her fingers and stretched herself flat on her back on the thick oriental rug, took up her accordion and commenced improvising a melody that had in it that wailing quality, that funereal suggestion inseparable from the music of a dying race, or an oppressed.
As she played Tamea sang, in a sweet little voice that scarcely filled the room, a semi-chant that Dan Pritchard suspected was also an improvisation, with words and music dedicated to the one who was still drifting outward with the tide.
Mrs. Pippy’s ultra-superior countenance commenced to soften and Julia stood listening open-mouthed.