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Rh awfully elegant about it and wouldn't think of touching them while I was there. She said it would seem strange eating without a plate. And all the time she was the most draggle-tailed, starving little scarecrow imaginable."

"Wish she would have the same scruples about my Golden Pippins," said Mr. Bartlett. "She sits under the tree scrunching them up by the dozen."

"I think that was partly your own fault, dear," said his wife. "If you remember, you asked her if she liked apples. I am sure that she took it as a sort of general invitation."

"She may have taken it as a general invitation, but when I came across her helping herself and said it, I meant it as a sort of specific prohibition."

"Yes," soliloquised Philip, "I have heard that children, savage tribes, the mentally deficient, and most women require their sarcasm underlined with a club to catch the drift properly. Possibly your Marianna comes within one or more of these categories."

"Oh, then she had a reference," exclaimed Mrs. Bartlett, reverting to the East End. "I wondered who on earth could have employed a little ragamuffin like that, but I thought that I had better see her. Marianna showed me the way; it was like going through the Ghetto or the Jago or the Bowery or some of those dreadful places one reads about. The house we went to was in Cement Street—a Mrs. Plack. She told me that Marianna's father and mother and sisters and brothers had all lodged in two of her rooms for a long time till they got so much in debt for their rent that she had to send them away. Then they went into one room somewhere else, and Mrs. Plack let Marianna stay with her because she did not like to go into the one room. She helped with things about the house, and Mrs. Plack said that