here first-off, an' gradjelly she
promoted me till I was first housemaid. I never left her till I got
married. If that don't make me an old family servant, I'd like to know."

"But he thinks you were an old family servant in _our_ house."

"Well, bless your heart, that's _his_ business, not mine. How can I help
what he thinks?"

"Didn't you tell him, Martha dear, that you nursed me till I was able to
walk?"

"Shoor I did! An' it's the livin' truth. What's the matter with that?
Believe _me_, you wasn't good for more than a minit or two more on your
legs, when I got you into your bed that blessed night. You was clean
bowled over, an' you couldn't 'a' walked another step if you'd been
killed for it. Didn't I nurse you them days you was in bed, helplesslike
as a baby? Didn't I nurse you till you could walk?"

"Indeed you did. And that's precisely the point!" said Claire. "If Mr.
Ronald--if Mrs. Sherman knew the truth, that I was poor, homeless,
without a friend in New York the night you picked me up on the street,
and carried me home and cared for me without knowing a thing about me,
they mightn't--they _wouldn't_ have taken me into their house and given
me their little boy to train. And because they wouldn't, I want to tell
them. I want to square myself. I ought to have told them long ago. I
want--"

"You want 'em to bounce you," observed Mrs. Slawson calmly. "Well,
there's always more'n one way of lookin' at things. For instance
any good chambermaid, _with experience_, will tell you there's three
ways of dustin'. The first is, do it thora, wipin' the rungs o' the
chairs, an' the backs o' the pictures, an' under the books on the
table like. The second is, just sorter flashin' your rag over the places
that shows, an' the third is--pull down the shades. They're all good
enough ways in their own time an' place, an' you foller them accordin'
to your disposition or, if you're nacherelly particular, accordin' to
the other things you got to do, in the time you got to do 'em _in_.
Now, _I'm_ particular. I'm the nacherelly thora kind, but if I'm
pressed, an' there's more important things up to me than the dustin',
I give it a lick an' a promise, same as the next one, an' let it go at
that, till the time comes I can do better. Life's too short to fuss an'
fidget your soul out over trifles. It ain't always what you _want_, but
what you _must_. You sometimes got to cut short at one end so's you can
piece out at another, an' you