recipe for homemade soap. It will not harden the texture. It will
give whiteness, and softness, and life. You can wear them long,
and fine white clothes are to be loved a long time. Oh, fine
washing is a refinement, an art. It is to be done as an artist
paints a picture, or writes a poem, with love, holily, a true
sacrament of beauty.

"I shall teach you better ways, my dear, better ways than you
Yankees know. I shall teach you new pretties." She nodded her
head to Saxon's underlinen on the line. "I see you make little
laces. I know all laces--the Belgian, the Maltese, the
Mechlin--oh, the many, many loves of laces! I shall teach you
some of the simpler ones so that you can make them for yourself,
for your brave man you are to make love you always and always."

On her first visit to Mercedes Higgins, Saxon received the recipe
for home-made soap and her head was filled with a minutiae of
instruction in the art of fine washing. Further, she was
fascinated and excited by all the newness and strangeness of the
withered old woman who blew upon her the breath of wider lands
and seas beyond the horizon.

"You are Spanish?" Saxon ventured.

"No, and yes, and neither, and more. My father was Irish, my
mother Peruvian-Spanish. 'Tis after her I took, in color and
looks. In other ways after my father, the blue-eyed Celt with the
fairy song on his tongue and the restless feet that stole the
rest of him away to far-wandering. And the feet of him that he
lent me have led me away on as wide far roads as ever his led