Young Horace Pepperall used to say that that was the reason the world didn't improve much. People got good on Sunday, and then it had to go and be Monday. He had an idea that if Sunday could be followed by some other day, preferably Saturday, there would be more happiness and virtue in the world. Mrs. Pepperall used to say that her boy was quite a ph'losopher in his way. Mr. Pepperall said he was a hopeless loafer and spent more time deciding whether he'd ought to do this or that than it would have taken to do 'em both twice. Whereupon Mrs. Pepperall, whose maiden name was Boody—daughter of Mrs. Ex-County-Clerk Boody—would remind her husband that he was only a Pepperall, after all, while her son was at least half Boody. Whereupon her husband would remind her of certain things about the Boodys. And so it would go. But that was other mornings. This was this morning.
Among all the homes that the sun looked upon—or would have looked upon if it could have looked upon anything and if it hadn't been raining and the Pepperall roof had not been impervious to light, though not to moisture—among them all, surely the Pepperall reveille would have been the least attractive. Homer never got his picture of rosy-fingered Aurora smilingly leaping out of the couch of night from any such home as the Pepperalls' in Carthage.
Serina was as unlike Aurora as possible. Aurora is usually poised on tiptoe, with her well-manicured nails gracefully extended, and nothing much about her except a chariot and more or less chiffon, according to whether the picture is for families or bachelors.
Serina was entirely surrounded by flannelette, of simple and pitilessly chaste design—a hole at the top for her head to go through and a larger one at the other extreme for her feet to stick out at. But it was so long that you couldn't have seen her feet if you had been there. And Papa Pepperall, who was there, was no longer interested in those once exciting ankles. They had been more interesting when there had been less of them. But we'd better talk about the sleeves.
The sleeves were so long that they kept falling into the water where Serina was making a hasty toilet at the little marble-topped altar to cleanliness which the Pepperalls called the "worsh-stand"—that is, the "hand-wash-basin," as Mrs. Hippisley called it after she came back from her never-to-be-forgotten trip to England.
But then Serina's sleeves had always been falling into the suds, and ever since she could remember she had rolled them up again with that peculiar motion with which people roll up sleeves. This morning, having failed to elicit papa from the bed by persuasion, she made such a racket about her ablutions that he lifted his dreary lids at last. He realized that it was morning, Monday, and raining. It irritated him so that he glared at his faithful wife with no fervor for her unsullied and unwearied—if not altogether unwearisome—devotion. He watched her roll up those sleeves thrice more. Somehow he wanted to scream at the futility of it. But he checked the impulse partly, and it was with softness that he made a comment he had choked back for years. "Serina—" he began.
"Well," she returned, pausing with the soap clenched in one hand.
He spoke with the luxurious leisureliness and the pauses for commas of a nearly educated man lolling too long abed:
"Serina, it has just occurred to me that, since we have been married, you have expended, on rolling back those everlastingly relapsing sleeves of yours, enough energy to have rolled the Sphinx of Egypt up on top of the Pyramid of Cheops."
Serina was so surprised that she shot the slippery soap under the wash-stand. She went right after it. There may be nymphs who can stalk a cake of soap under a wash-stand with grace, but Serina was not one of them. Her indolent spouse made another cynical comment: