If you knew nothing about Rose; if you had not already been told that she slept on the sitting-room davenport; that she was taken for granted as the family drudge; that she was, in that household, merely an intelligent machine that made beds, fried eggs, filled hot water bags, you would get a characterization of her from this:  She was the sort of person who never has a closet or bureau drawer all her own.  Her few and negligible garments hung apologetically in obscure corners of closets dedicated to her sister’s wardrobe or her brother’s, or her spruce and fussy old father’s.  Vague personal belongings, such as combings, handkerchiefs, a spectacle case, a hairbrush, were found tucked away in a desk pigeon-hole, a table drawer, or on the top shelf in the bathroom.

As she pulled the disfiguring blue gingham dust-cap over her hair now, and rolled her sleeves to her elbows, you would never have dreamed that Rose was embarking upon her great adventure.  You would never have guessed that the semi-yearly closet cleaning was to give to Rose a thrill as delicious as it was exquisitely painful.  But Rose knew.  And so she teased herself, and tried not to think of the pasteboard box on the shelf in the hall closet, under the pile of reserve blankets, and told herself that she would leave that closet until the last, when she would have to hurry over it.

* * * * *

When you clean closets and bureau drawers thoroughly you have to carry things out to the back porch and flap them, Rose was that sort of housekeeper.  She leaned over the porch railing and flapped things, so that the dust motes spun and swirled in the sunshine.  Rose’s arms worked up and down energetically, then less energetically, finally ceased their motion altogether.  She leaned idle elbows on the porch railing and gazed down into the yard below with a look in her eyes such as no squalid Chicago back yard, with its dusty debris, could summon, even in spring-time.

The woman next door came out on her back porch that adjoined Rose’s.  The day seemed to have her in its spell, too, for in her hand was something woolly and wintry, and she began to flap it about as Rose had done.  She had lived next door since October, had that woman, but the two had never exchanged a word, true to the traditions of their city training.  Rose had her doubts of the woman next door.  She kept a toy dog which she aired afternoons, and her kimonos were florid and numerous.  Now, as the eyes of the two women met, Rose found herself saying, “Looks like summer.”

The woman next door caught the scrap of conversation eagerly, hungrily.  “It certainly does!  Makes me feel like new clothes, and housecleaning.”

“I started to-day!” said Rose, triumphantly.

“Not already!” gasped the woman next door, with the chagrin that only a woman knows who has let May steal upon her unawares.

From far down the alley sounded a chant, drawing nearer and nearer, until there shambled into view a decrepit horse drawing a dilapidated huckster’s cart.  Perched on the seat was a Greek who turned his dusky face up toward the two women leaning over the porch railings.  “Rhubarb, leddy.  Fresh rhubarb!”