They’d put a glass case up in the office and it was all hung with work—crocheted things, knit and embroidered things, fringed things. “Did by the inmates,” says she, proud. That word “inmates” is to the word “people” what the word “support” is to the word “share.” It’s a word we could spare.
I looked at the things in the case—hours and hours and hours the fingers of the women upstairs had worked on ’em—intricate counting, difficult stitches, pretty patterns. And each of them was marked with a price tag. The County House inmates had got ’em hung out there in the hope of earning a little money. One was a bed-spread—a whole crocheted bed-spread. And one—one was a dress crocheted from collar to hem, and hung on with all sorts of crazy crocheted ends and tassels so—I knew—to make the job last a little longer. And when I saw that, I grabbed the tall, thick matron by the arm and I shook her a little.
“What was we doing,” I says, “that these folks wasn’t taught to do some kind of work so’s they could have kept out of the poor house?”
She looked at me odd and cool.
“Why,” she said, “my dear Miss Marsh, it’s being in here that gives ’em the leisure to make the things at all!”
What was the use of talking to her? And besides being unreasonable, she was one of them that you’re awful put to it to keep from being able not to right down dislike. And I went along the passage thinking: “She acts like the way things are is the way things ought to be. But it always seems to me that the way things ought to be is the best way things could be. For the earth ain’t so full of the fulness thereof but that we could all do something to make it a little more so.”
And then the thing happened that opened the door to all I’d been thinking about, and let me slip through inside.
Being I was there, I dropped in a minute to see old Grandma Stuart. She was one of the eighty “inmates.” Up in the ward where she was sitting, there were twenty beds. And between each two beds was a shelf and a washbasin, and over it a hook. And old Grandma Stuart sat there by her bed and her shelf and her hook. She was old and white, and she had fine wrinkles, like a dead flower. She drew me down to her, with her cold hands.
“Miss Marsh,” she said, “I got two-three things.”
“Yes,” I says, “well, that’s nice,” I says. And wondered if that was the right thing to say to her.