"Have you seen your husband's room?"
"I have seen it."
"And what do you think of this room next to mine?"
The woman pointed to an open door. Nancy followed her indication and looked into a neat bare chamber, scoured cleaner than most of the apartments in this dilapidated house.
"The air is better here," she said smiling.
The lao t'ai-t'ai beamed with approval of her words.
"All said neatly in a phrase, as a scholar ought to say it," she thought to herself, "not a breath of complaint about her husband, not an undutiful syllable, and yet the whole story clear as the sun."
"Ai, my daughter," she said, "that is to be your room. Your wit would be wasted anywhere but here."
At the command of her mistress Nancy brought her things. She was astonished by the readiness of the other women to help her and not much daunted by their advice.
"My mother is an old woman," warned the stepmother, holding Nancy by her scowling voice, "and like all old women, much given to strong fancies. At the moment her fancy is for you and, because she may not live long, it is our natural duty to humor her. Your parents-in-law and your husband of course have agreed to this and we expect you to obey her in everything she asks and to make her comfortable, whatever the cost to yourself. But do not forget that an old woman's words are many and her memory is brief, and that while she may condescend to honor you as her companion and to say kind things to you, that gives you no excuse to be proud or to think that you are better than the rest of us. She is the head of the family; she can say what she chooses; but you are still the least of us, you have to wait your time of authority, like every person of your years, and if you let your head be turned by an old woman's flattery, then the day will come—and it may come soon—when you will have bitter lessons to learn at our hands and at the hands of your husband. I tell you this because you have been spoiled too much already; you have been indulged by your father and made a little god by a maudlin old nurse, and it would be a pity if the training we have started to give you had to be repeated with a stick merely because my worthy old mother cannot curb her passion for new faces."