ring back is a poor sort of business
when the other person is able to make you pay for every idle word.
Of course, it's different if you haven't anything to lose by it. So
I just said--

'Never mind, aunt dear. I really haven't brought much; and what
would you like me to do first?'

'I should think you'd see for yourself,' says she, thumping her
pillows, 'that there's not a stick in the house been dusted yet--no,
nor a stair swep'.'

So I set to to clean the house, which was cleaner than most people's
already, and I got a nice bit of dinner and took it up on a tray.
But no, that wasn't right, for I'd put the best instead of the
second-best cloth on the tray.

'The workhouse is where you'll end,' says aunt.

But she ate up all the dinner, and after that she seemed to get a
little easier in her temper, and by-and-by fell off to sleep.

I finished the stairs and tidied up the kitchen, and then I went to
dust the parlour.

Now, my aunt's parlour was a perfect moral. I have never seen its
like before or since. The mantelpiece and the corner cupboard, and
the shelves behind the door, and the top of the chest of drawers and
the bureau were all covered up with a perfect litter and lurry of
old china. Not sets of anything, but different basins and jugs and
cups and plates and china spoons and the bust of John Wesley and
Elijah feeding the ravens in a red gown and standing on a green
crockery grass plot.

There was every kind of china uselessness that you could think of;
and Sarah and I used to think it hard that a girl had no chance of
getting on in life without she dusted all this rubbish once a week
at the least.

'Well, the sooner begun the sooner ended,' says I to myself So I
took the silk handkerchief that aunt kep' a purpose--an old one it
was that had belonged to uncle, and hemmed with aunt's own hair and
marked with his name in the corner. (Folks must have had a deal of
time in those days, I often think.) And I began to dust the things,
beginning with the big bowl on the chest of drawers, for aunt always
would have everything done just one way and no other.

You think, perhaps, that I might as well have sat down in the
arm-chair and had a quiet nap and told aunt afterwards that I had
dusted everything; but you must know she was quite equivalent to
asking any of the neighbours who might drop in whether that dratted
china of hers was dusted properly.

It was a hot afternoon, and I was tired and a bit cross.