vision, through which her exotic airs and graces might be more tolerantly
perceived.

The illness of one of the servants came just here to assist her. She
descended upon the kitchen, taking full charge and carrying Abner with
her. She initiated him at the chopping-block, she conferred the second
degree at the pump-handle, and by the time he was beating up eggs in a
big yellow bowl beside the kitchen stove his eyes had come to be focused
on her in quite a different fashion. Surely no one could be more deft,
light-handed, practical. Was this the same young woman who had sat in the
midst of that absurd outfit and had juggled rather affectedly and
self-consciously with tea-urn and sugar-tongs and had palavered in empty
nothings with a troop of overdressed and overmannered feather-heads? She
was still graceful, still fluent, still endowed with that baffling little
air of distinction; but she knew where things were--down to the last
strainer or nutmeg-grater--and she knew how to use them. She was
completely at home. And so--by this time--was he.

To deepen the impression, Medora asked Abner to help her lay the table.
There were no studio gimcracks, mercifully, to put into place; but the
tableware was as far removed, on the other hand, from the ugly, heavy,
time-scarred things at Flatfield and from the careless crudities of his
own boarding-house. Abner had had a tolerance, even a liking, for his
landlady's indifference toward finicky table-furnishings; but now there
came a sudden vision of her dining-room, and the spots on the
table-cloth, the nicks in the crockery, the shabbiness of the lambrequin
drooping from the mantel-piece, and the slovenliness of the sole
handmaiden had never been so vivid.

"Shall I be able to go back there?" he asked himself.