Miss Theodosia groaned. "It may be blueing streaks," she said, but there
was little comfort in blueing streaks. She got her opera glasses and
peered through them at her beloved dresses. Brought up at close range,
they were certainly blue-streaked, and there was plain lack of the snowy
whiteness her stern washing-creed demanded.

At intervals, small figures issued from the house and circled about the
clotheslines, inspecting their contents critically. Miss Theodosia saw
one of them--it was the child of her doorstep--lay questionable hold (it
must be questionable!) upon a delicate garment and examine a portion of
it excitedly. She saw the child dart back to the house and again issue
forth, dragging the slender young washerwoman. Together they examined.
Miss Theodosia caught up her glasses and brought the little pair into
the near field of her vision; she saw both anxious young faces. The face
of Stefana was strained and careworn.

Miss Theodosia was thirty-six years old, and all of the years had been
comfortable, carefree ones. In the natural order of her pleasantly
migratory, luxurious life, she had rarely come into close contact with
careworn or strained faces; this contact through the small, clear lenses
seemed startlingly close. Stefana's lean and anxious face, the child's
baby-bent little back, like the back of an old woman--it was at these
Miss Theodosia looked through her pearl glasses. She forgot to look at
the garment the children examined so troubledly. Suddenly, Miss
Theodosia Baxter--traveler, fortune-favored one--found herself as
anxious for the success of Stefana's stout little project as the two
young people within her field of view, but, suddenly and unaccountably,
from a new motive. The slim, worn-looking little creature,--and that
tinier, tired little creature--must not fail! The stout project should
succeed!