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It was his aunt's voice calling and he went instantly to a tall, austere lady in a linen collar who was knitting wash-rags with the feverish haste of a piece-worker in a factory. He stood before her obediently. "Don't go in to-day." "Why, Auntie?" In his voice there was a world of disappointment. "It's too rough there must have been a storm at sea."
Burke seemed incapable of sitting still, with folded hands, for any length of time; and when the stress of her attention to household work, and her devotion to neighborly good deeds relaxed, she turned to knitting wash-rags as a sportsman turns to his gun, or a toper to his cups.
"That hymn about 'Hand Around the Wash-rag. I've heard you a-singin' it." "Hand around the wash-rag! Why Billy Ruggles, what can you mean?" "Yes," insisted Billy, who had a good ear for music in his poor, cracked head. "You was singin' it las' night." "I can't imagine what you mean, Billy. When we were on the piazza, do you mean? We didn't sing anything about wash-rags, I'm sure.
"You might not have been able to if you had had half a dozen children and a drinking husband, or one who was out of work half the time," her brother said. An elderly blush spread over his sister's face. "Well, the Lord knows I'd rather have the soap and towels and wash-rags than a drunken husband and half a dozen dirty children," she retorted, sharply.
She peeped through the glass at the perfume-boxes of black and gold and citron in the hollow table. She looked about at shelves of red rubber water-bottles, pale yellow sponges, wash-rags with blue borders, hair-brushes of polished cherry backs. She shook her head like a nervous medium coming out of a trance, stared at him unhappily, demanded: "Why should I stay here? And I must make up my mind.
"You must take that into account, Maria. It takes a little extra money even to keep clean; people don't get that into their heads, generally speaking, but it is so." "Well, I haven't had much money," said Aunt Maria, "but I must say I have kept myself in soap and wash-rags and towels."
And Ann Hughes used to let him do all the laundry-work connected with the wash-rags and his own pocket-handkerchiefs, into which, regularly, every Wednesday, he burned little brown holes with the toy flat-iron, which would get too hot. But Johnny Robertson and Joe Stuart and the other boys, and even the uncles and the aunts, never knew anything about that unless Ann Hughes gave it away!
"Ah, those Espergnons, they're always on time, they are; they had their hangings out a week ago, and now they are as filthy as wash-rags. No wonder they have time to walk the streets!" and the indignant dame gave her window-pane an extra polish. "Here, Leon, catch hold, I'm ready now!" The woman was holding out one end of a long, snowy sheet.
More than once during the winter, the lad had gazed out of his snow-crusted panes at this dwarfed donkey of the woods, its feet buried deep in ashes, its body covered with kitchen wash-rags and Bible students' frozen underwear. He had reasoned that such soil and such servitude had killed it.
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