humble office was merely to make ready for the
literary feast and modest bodily refreshment to come.

It was one of the contradictions of Split's nature--her intense
occasional domesticity and the practical good sense that marked her home
economies. She rose now, basin in hand. Her sleeves were rolled up, her
bushy hair, a troublesome half-length now, was bound up in a towel. She
had been scrubbing and polishing the zinc under the stove, and she was
as happy as she was executive. She flew about trilling "The Zingara,"
with a smudge on her chin and a big kitchen-apron tied about her waist,
looking like a dirty little slavey; yet putting the mark of her
thoroughness upon everything she touched and Miss Madigan overlooked.

"The big rug from your room is to go over the hole by the window?" she
asked perfunctorily, being half-way through the hall at the time.

"Oh, I'm so glad you remembered it," said Miss Madigan. "Mrs. Forrest
tripped in that hole the last time. I thought it was exceedingly
impolite of her to call attention to it that way, because--"

"Shall I turn the couch-cover?" demanded Split.

"I don't see how you can," said Miss Madigan, helplessly. "It's worn on
the other side."

But with a tug Split had drawn it off, pillows and all, and she flew
up-stairs, carrying Kate in her wake to help her pull down a portiere
which she intended transforming into a couch-cover.

Things sentient as well as material were accustomed to doing double duty
at the Madigans' on Tridentata nights. When Francis Madigan, forewarned
that his bell would often be rung that evening, but that he was not
expected to resent the insult, had retreated to his castle and pulled up
the drawbridge behind him, the slavey, with Sissy as assistant, became
doorkeeper, and, later, butler. Critics, of course, these two were ex
officio; and from their station out in the chilly hall, they listened to
and mocked at the literary program, which Miss Madigan had entitled, "A
Night of All Nations."

The opening duet between Maude and Henrietta Bryne-Stivers they had
heard before. Few people in Virginia, indeed, had not.

"Trash!" Sissy pronounced it in Professor Trask's best manner.

The reading from "Sodom's Ende," in the original, by the traveled Mrs.
Pemberton, was fiercely resented by her audience outside the gates. It
always made a Madigan furious to hear a foreign tongue; for, apart from
the affectation of strange pronunciations, the deliberate