Her normalness took the form of an instinct which amounted to genius
for seeing what people ought to have, and in some occult way filling
in bare or trying places.

"She's just a wonder, that girl," Mrs. Bowse said to one boarder
after another.

"She's just a wonder," Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger murmured to
each other in rueful confidence, as they tilted their chairs against
the wall of their hall bedroom and smoked. Each of the shabby and
poverty-stricken young men had of course fallen hopelessly in love
with her at once. This was merely human and inevitable, but realizing
in the course of a few weeks that she was too busy taking care of her
irritable, boisterous old Manchester father, and everybody else, to
have time to be made love to even by young men who could buy new
boots when the old ones had ceased to be water-tight, they were
obliged to resign themselves to the, after all, comforting fact that
she became a mother to them, not a sister. She mended their socks and
sewed buttons on for them with a firm frankness which could not be
persuaded into meaning anything more sentimental than a fixed habit
of repairing anything which needed it, and which, while at first
bewildering in its serenity, ended by reducing the two youths to a
dust of devotion.

"She's a wonder, she is," they sighed when at every weekend they
found their forlorn and scanty washing resting tidily on their bed.

In the course of a week, more or less, Tembarom's feeling for her
would have been exactly that of his two hall-bedroom neighbors, but
that his nature, though a practical one, was not inclined to any