, why, why?" which is the mark of the
"womanly" woman. But his tendency to be anyone he was interested in
implied enormous sympathy (for the time being), and though Grizel
spurned his overtures, this only fired his pride of conquest. We can all
get whatever we want if we are quite determined to have it (though it be
a king's daughter), and in the end Tommy vanquished Grizel. How? By
offering to let her come into Aaron's house and wash it and dust it and
ca'm it, "just as if you were our mother," an invitation she could not
resist. To you this may seem an easy way, but consider the penetration
he showed in thinking of it. It came to him one day when he saw her lift
the smith's baby out of the gutter, and hug it with a passionate delight
in babies.

"She's so awid to do it," he said basely to Elspeth, "that we needna let
on how much we want it done." And he also mentioned her eagerness to
Aaron as a reason why she should be allowed to do it for nothing.

For Aaron to hold out against her admittance would have been to defraud
himself, for she transformed his house. When she saw the brass lining of
the jelly-pan discolored, and that the stockings hanging from the string
beneath the mantelpiece had given way where the wearers were hardest on
them; when she found dripping adhering to a cold frying-pan instead of
in a "pig," and the pitcher leaking and the carrot-grater stopped--when
these and similar discoveries were made by Grizel, was it a squeal of
horror she gave that such things should be, or a cry of rapture because
to her had fallen the task of setting them right?

"She just made a jump for the besom," was Tommy's graphic description of
how it all began.

You should have seen Grizel on the hoddy-table knocking nails into the
wall. The hoddy-table is so called because it goes beneath the larger
one at night, like a chicken under its mother, and Grizel, with the
nails in her mouth, used them up so quickly that you would have sworn
she swallowed half of them; yet she rocked her arms because she could
not be at all four walls at once. She rushed about the room until she
was dizzy, and Tommy knew the moment to cry "Grip her, she'll tumble!"
when he and Elspeth seized her and put her on a stool.

It is on the hoddy-table that you bake and iron. "There's not a
baking-board in the house," Elspeth explained. "There is!" cried Grizel,
there and then converting a drawer into one.

Between her big bannocks she made baby ones