Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/31

Rh “Do you know who washed those clothes?” she asked rather abruptly.

“Yes, I do,” replied the girl.

“Then I wish you would tell me,” continued Brenda, “it would oblige me very much. She must be a good laundress.”

The other girl looked intently at Brenda, as if to make out her purpose in asking the question. Then, after a second of hesitation, she answered without any circumlocution: “My mother washed those things. She ought to be a good laundress.”

Her tone might have meant either, “Whatever my mother does, she does well,” or, “My mother has had so  much experience that she can’t help being a good  laundress.”

Brenda interpreted it in the latter way.

“Then I wonder,” she said, with some animation, “if she would do some washing for us. You see it is so very hard to get any one who is regular, and my mother has  had so much trouble with Mrs. Slattery, and—”

The other girl interrupted her.

“You misunderstood me. My mother is n’t a laundress. She just happened to wash those clothes because we are without a girl at present, and we can’t find a washwoman,—at least not at reasonable prices,” she concluded in an  undertone. “They all want to work by the day for the summer people.”

“Oh, I’m very sorry,” Brenda stood there in considerable confusion, she was often thoughtless, but it seemed to