“She was pretty nervous.”  Mrs. Mundy’s usually cheerful voice was troubled.  “To talk to her, ask her questions, would just have made her more so.  They won’t tell you anything if they can help it—­girls like that—­and I didn’t try to make her tell.  I gave her something to quiet her and stayed with her until she was asleep, but when I went in the room this morning she was gone.  Bettina said she heard some one unbolt the door very softly, but she thought ’twas me.”

“Do you suppose she lives in this neighborhood?  Her people must have been very anxious.”

Mrs. Mundy turned and looked at me queerly.  She has tremendous admiration for what she calls my book-learning, and sees no incongruity in my ignorance of many things with which she is familiar.  My ignorance, indeed, she thinks it her duty to conserve, and already we have had some differences of opinion as to what I should know and not know of the life about us.  There are a good many things I have got to make Mrs. Mundy take in more definitely.  She thinks of me still as a girl.  I am not.  I am a woman twenty-six years old.

“Half the girls you’ve seen coming home from work, half who live around the Square, haven’t any people here.  What they have is a room in somebody’s house.  Many are from the country or from small towns.  Over sixteen thousand work in the factories alone.  You don’t suppose they all have homes, do you?—­have some one who waits up for them at night, some one who cares when they come in?”

Before I could answer she stopped her dusting and, head on the side and hands on her hips, listened.  “There’s the iceman at the kitchen door,” she said, relievedly.  “I’ll have to go and let him in.”

It is this I cannot understand, this unusual evasiveness on Mrs. Mundy’s part.  She is the least mysterious of persons, is, indeed, as open as the day, and it is unlike her to act as she has done.  From childhood I have known her.  Up to the time of Aunt Matilda’s marriage to Mr. Chesmond she made my clothes, and for years, in all times of domestic complications has been our dependence.  When I decided to live for a while in the house once owned by my grandfather, I turned to her in confidence that she would care not only for my material needs, but that from her I could get what no one else could give me—­an insight into scenes and situations commonly concealed from surface sight.

Her knowledge of life is wide and varied.  With unfailing faith and cheerful courage and a habit of seeing the humorous side of tragic catastrophes, she has done her work among the sick and forsaken, with no appeal to others save a certain few; and only those who have been steadied by her strong hands, and heartened by her buoyant spirit, and fed from her scant store, have knowledge or understanding of what she means to the section of the city where the poor and lowly live.  Bit by bit I am learning, but even yet it is difficult to make her tell me all she does, or how and when she does it.