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Only four and a half, too, and they reminded each other of the first day he put on knickerbockers; stood in front of the house on the sidewalk all day long with his hands in his pockets. The interest was directed from Vandover, they turned their backs, grouping themselves about the little boy. The burnisher's sister-in-law felt called upon to tell about her little girl, a matter of family pride.
"You never touched that, I'll bet a hat." Vandover did not answer; he brought in the pail of water, and soaping his scrubbing brush, went down again on his hands and knees, washing the paint on the baseboard where the burnisher's wife indicated. The two women stood by, looking on and directing his movements.
In the end the burnisher's wife took the house. Geary even induced her to deposit five dollars with him in order to secure it. Vandover was down in the basement filling a barrel with the odds and ends of rubbish left by the previous tenants: broken bottles, old corsets, bones, rusty bedsprings. The dead hen he had taken out first of all, carrying it by one leg.
"Put a little more elbow grease to it," continued the burnisher's wife. "You have to rub them spots pretty hard to get 'em out. Now scrub all along here near the floor. You see that streak there that's all gormed up with something or other. Bugs get in there mighty quick. There, that'll do, I guess. Now, is everything else all clean?
A moment later the army of operatives began to pour out of the main entrance; men and girls and young boys, all in a great hurry, the men settling their coat collars as they ran down the steps. The usually quiet street was crowded in an instant. The burnisher's wife stood on the steps of the vacant house with her sister, watching the throng debouch into the street.
"The man will work at it until it is. You can keep an eye on him and see that the work is done to suit you." "You see," objected the burnisher's wife, "I would want to move in right away. I don't want to wait all week for the man to get through." "But he is going to be through with this house to-night," exclaimed Geary delighted.
This jobb was greatly to my content, and by and by the flaggon being finished at the burnisher's, I home, and there fitted myself, and took a hackney-coach I hired, it being a very cold and foule day, to Woolwich, all the way reading in a good book touching the fishery, and that being done, in the book upon the statute of charitable uses, mightily to my satisfaction.
Among them was Paul de Gery, silent, absorbed in an admiration which each day sunk into his heart a little more deeply, trying to understand the beautiful sphinx draped in purple cashmere and ecru lace, who worked away bravely amid her clay, a burnisher's apron reaching nearly to her neck, allowing her small, proud head to emerge with those transparent tones, those gleams of veiled radiance of which the sense, the inspiration bring the blood to the cheek as they pass.
"Yes," answered Vandover, straightening up, nodding his head. "Yes, I've finished." "Well, just come in here and look at this." Vandover followed her into the little parlour. Her sister was there, very fat, smelling somehow of tallow candles and cooked cabbage; nearby stood the little boy still eating his bread and butter. "Look at that baseboard," exclaimed the burnisher's wife.
They were looking over their future home again; evidently they lived close by. Suddenly the burnisher's wife came out upon the front steps, looking down into the little garden, calling for Vandover. She was not pretty; she had a nose like a man and her chin was broad. "Say, there," she called to Vandover, "do you mean to say that you've finished inside here?"
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