way. No scolding or abuse could make its mark on her uncouth and aged
peasant hide. She said her "Yes, Miss Annie," when an answer had to
come, and that was always all that she could say.

"Old Katy is just a rough old woman, Miss Mathilda," Anna said, "but
I think I keep her here with me. She can work and she don't give me
trouble like I had with Molly all the time."

Anna always had a humorous sense from this old Katy's twisted peasant
english, from the roughness on her tongue of buzzing s's and from the
queer ways of her brutish servile humor. Anna could not let old Katy
serve at table--old Katy was too coarsely made from natural earth for
that--and so Anna had all this to do herself and that she never liked,
but even then this simple rough old creature was pleasanter to her
than any of the upstart young.

Life went on very smoothly now in these few months before the summer
came. Miss Mathilda every summer went away across the ocean to be gone
for several months. When she went away this summer old Katy was so
sorry, and on the day that Miss Mathilda went, old Katy cried hard
for many hours. An earthy, uncouth, servile peasant creature old Katy
surely was. She stood there on the white stone steps of the little red
brick house, with her bony, square dull head with its thin, tanned,
toughened skin and its sparse and kinky grizzled hair, and her strong,
squat figure a little overmade on the right side, clothed in her blue
striped cotton dress, all clean and always washed but rough and harsh
to see--and she stayed there on the steps till Anna brought her in,
blubbering, her apron to her face, and making queer guttural broken
moans.