eces
of furniture too, such as were usual in rooms of the kind, but most of
them, perhaps in ignorance, had been put to novel uses, like the
plate-rack, where the Painted Lady kept her many pretty shoes instead of
her crockery. Gossip said she had a looking-glass of such prodigious
size that it stood on the floor, and Tommy nudged Elspeth to signify,
"There it is!" Other nudges called her attention to the carpet, the
spinet, a chair that rocked like a cradle, and some smaller oddities, of
which the queerest was a monster velvet glove hanging on the nail that
by rights belonged to the bellows. The Painted Lady always put on this
glove before she would touch the coals, which diverted Tommy, who knew
that common folk lift coals with their bare hands while society uses the
fringe of its second petticoat.

It might have been a boudoir through which a kitchen and bedroom had
wandered, spilling by the way, but though the effect was tawdry,
everything had been rubbed clean by that passionate housewife, Grizel.
She was on her knees at present ca'ming the hearth-stone a beautiful
blue, and sometimes looking round to address her mother, who was busy
among her plants and cut flowers. Surely they were know-nothings who
called this woman silly, and blind who said she painted. It was a little
face all of one color, dingy pale, not chubby, but retaining the soft
contours of a child's face, and the features were singularly delicate.
She was clad in a soft gray, and her figure was of the smallest; there
was such an air of youth about her that Tommy thought she could become a
girl again by merely shortening her frock, not such a girl as gaunt
Grizel, though, who would have looked a little woman had she let her
frock down. In appearance indeed the Painted Lady resembled her plain
daughter not at all, but in manner in a score of ways, as when she
rocked her arms joyously at sight of a fresh bud or tossed her brown
hair from her brows with a pretty gesture that ought, God knows, to have
been for some man to love. The watchers could not hear what she and
Grizel said, but evidently it was pleasant converse, and mother and
child, happy in each other's company, presented a picture as sweet as it
is common, though some might have complained that they were doing each
other's work. But the Painted Lady's delight in flowers was a scandal in
Thrums, where she would stand her ground if the roughest boy approached
her with roses in his hand, and she ga