“I don’t know how to be company. Please get me some fresh hot water.”
I took the pail and fetched obediently. Then, while she worked at the windows, I began tugging things in from the shed, calling Joe from the barn to help me with the desk and bookcases. The desk, obviously, went by the west window, where the light would come from the left. My five bookcases, which had been made for my college rooms, of uniform size, were placed, four along the south wall, filling the spaces between the central door and the two windows, and the two windows and the end walls, with the fifth on the west wall between the window and the south, where I could have my reference books close to my desk chair. My piano, which had stood in the dining-room ever since the furniture had arrived, we unboxed, wheeled in to fill the space between the small east windows, and took the covers off.
I looked around. Already the place was assuming a homelike air, and the long room had contracted into intimacy. The girl dropped her rag into the pail, and stood looking about.
“Oh, the nice room!” she cried. “And oh, the dirty piano!”
I went out to begin on the books, and when I returned with the first load (I used a wheelbarrow, and wheeled a big load covered with my raincoat as far as the front door, and up into the hall on a plank), Miss Goodwin was scrubbing the keys. As I began to wipe off the books and set them into the cases, I could hear that peculiar dust-cloth glissando which denotes domestic operations on the piano, and which brings curiously home to a man memories of his mother. When I returned with the next load, I brought the piano bench, as well. The girl was busy with the east window, and I set the bench down in silence. She was seated upon it, when I arrived with the third load, and through the house were dancing the sounds of a Bach gavotte.
She stopped playing as I entered, and looked up with a little smile of apology.
“Please go on!” I cried.
“But you play,” she said, “and I just drum. It’s too silly.”
“I play with one finger only,” said I, “the forefinger of the right hand.”
“Then why do you have the piano?”