Page:Sheila and Others (1920).djvu/181

Rh of two cold, and hungry babes locked in with desolation while their mother did my washing for what had never before seemed so much like a pittance.

Lizzie followed, and her frank satisfaction in "doing" for us was no small item in her favor. She was diminutive, black-robed, seamy, but invincibly cheerful.

"I ain't what you might call a large person, Ma'am," she explained to me, "but I'm that wiry. An' ef I stan' on a box er suthin' I kin reach the tubs real good."

We stood her on a box, and she reached, but all the best efforts of her attenuated arms could not keep the linen at that high-water mark of snowy whiteness Mrs. Gallegar had imparted. They soon settled back to the discouraging tone of gray with which I was only too familiar.

In our first private interview, Lizzie told her story—or a story—which contained lively elements of romance and involved numerous relatives singularly deficient in family feeling. She hailed from Pennsylvania, but was "drove from it" by cruel circumstances in which she figured always as the victim. One wept internally to see the disordered threads of ro-