the stairs with your breakfast. And you'd fault her for washin' for
you--and cleanin' your house--you'd fault her for it! I know the kind
of ye--you'd rather powder ye'r neck than wash it, any day!"

No one would recognize the young Normalite who two weeks before had
taken the highest marks in English, and had read her essay at the
closing exercises, and afterwards had it printed, at the editor's
request, in the _Evening Echo_, for Pearl's fierce anger had brought
her back again to the language of her childhood.

"And he as much as told you, did he?" she whispered, turning around
to glare in stormy wrath at the unoffending telephone--"he as much as
told you there was nothing in it?"

Pearl puckered her lips and shut one eye in a mighty mental effort to
imagine what he would say, but in trying to hear his words she could
only see his glowing face, the rumpled hair she loved so well, and
then her voice came back like a perfect phonograph record, that
strong, mellow, big voice which had always set her heart tingling and
drove away every fear. She couldn't make him say anything else but the
old sweet words that had lived with her for the last three years.

The storm faded from her eyes in a moment, and in the rush of joy that
broke over her, she threw herself down beside old Nap and kissed the
shiny top of his smooth black head. Then going over to the telephone,
she shook her fist at it:

"Did my mother wash for you, ma'am? She did--and you never had better
washin' done! Are we common people?--we are, and we're not ashamed.
We're doin' fine, thank you--all the children are at school but me,