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He set Jamie down, and, all unconscious of the little drama being played round his young life, the child stretched out a chubby hand in the direction of the soap-box he and his sister had been playing with. "'Piders," he observed laconically. Vada rushed past him to inspect their treasures, her tears already dried into streaks on her dirty little cheeks.
Then she found that shutting her eyes, and thinking very hard about the little brown house at home, seemed to bring it into plain sight. It was like opening a book, and seeing picture after picture as she turned the pages. There they were in the kitchen, washing dishes, she and Mary; and Mary was standing on a soap-box to make her tall enough to handle the dishes easily.
When at the age of one she had crawled out of the soap-box that served as a cradle, and had eaten half a box of stove polish, she was acting in strict accord with the Constitution. By the time she reached the sophisticated age of eleven her ideals had changed, but her principles remained firm. She did not stoop to beg for her rights, but struck out for them boldly with her small bare fists.
Salamander is there, before a circular looking-glass three inches in diameter in the lid of a soap-box, making a complicated mess of a neck-tie in futile attempts to produce the sailor's knot. Blondin is there, before a similar glass, carefully scraping the bristles round a frostbite on his chin with a blunt razor.
Gay, in the dressing-room, was carefully counting over her toilet articles, as she put them back into her bag. "Soap-box, comb, nail-file, tooth-powder I haven't lost a thing this trip, Allison. I'm beginning to feel proud of myself. Here's my watch and here's my tickets, buttoned up in this pocket. Mamma had it made on purpose, so in case of a wreck at night I'd have them on me.
Finishing some little time before his guests, he rolled a cigarette, left them to polish out the frying-pan with the last morsels of bread, and, going back to the buckboard, fumbled a moment in a second soap-box under the seat.
She could not tell whether it was the barrenness of the room, or Milt's carefulness, that caught her. The uncarpeted boards of the floor were well swept. He had only one plate, one spoon, but they were scoured, and put away on newspaper-covered shelves in a cupboard made of a soap-box. Behind a calico curtain was his new suit, dismayingly neat on its hanger.
Peggy placed her offering conveniently near the nest, raised a warning finger to the chattering girls, as if there had been a baby asleep in the soap-box the yellow hen was occupying, and then tiptoed off, with an air of exaggerated caution. "You see, she's very excited and nervous," Peggy explained, in a subdued voice.
On the outskirts of the group of older loafers, the growing crop of men who would later take their places in the soap-box forum lingered; while sky-larking about the verge of the crowd were smaller boys who were learning no good, to say the least, in attaching themselves to the older members of the company.
A half-finished mat, with its bundle of rags put carefully aside; the thirsty potato-vine on the fire-escape, which reached appealingly from its soap-box toward the window, as if in wondering search for the hands that had tended it so faithfully, bore silent testimony that Mrs. Ben Wah's work-day was over at last. It had been a long day how long no one may ever know.
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