But she shook her head; and as she presently walked through the rain holding Fritzing’s umbrella,—­none had been bought to replace hers, broken on the journey—­getting muddier and more draggled every minute, she felt that now indeed she had got down to elementary conditions, climbed right down out of the clouds to the place where life lies unvarnished and uncomfortable, where Necessity spends her time forcing you to do all the things you don’t like, where the whole world seems hungry and muddy and wet.  It was an extraordinary experience for her, this slopping through the mud with soaking shoes, no prospect of a meal, and a heart that insisted on sinking in spite of her attempts to persuade herself that the situation was amusing.  It did not amuse her.  It might have amused somebody else,—­the Grand Duke, for instance, if he could have watched her now (from, say, a Gothic window, himself dry and fed and taken care of), being punished so naturally and inevitably by the weapons Providence never allows to rust, those weapons that save parents and guardians so much personal exertion if only they will let things take their course, those sharp, swift consequences that attend the actions of the impetuous.  I might, indeed, if this were a sermon and there were a congregation unable to get away, expatiate on the habit these weapons have of smiting with equal fury the just and the unjust; how you only need to be a little foolish, quite a little foolish, under conditions that seem to force it upon you, and down they come, sure and relentless, and you are smitten with a thoroughness that leaves you lame for years; how motives are nothing, circumstances are nothing; how the motives may have been aflame with goodness, the circumstances such that any other course was impossible; how all these things don’t matter in the least,—­you are and shall be smitten.  But this is not a sermon.  I have no congregation.  And why should I preach to a reader who meanwhile has skipped?

It comforted Priscilla to find that almost the whole village wanted to come and cook for her, or as the women put it “do” for her.  Their cooking powers were strictly limited, and they proposed to make up for this by doing for her very completely in other ways; they would scrub, sweep, clean windows, wash,—­anything and everything they would do.  Would they also sew buttons on her uncle’s clothes?  Priscilla asked anxiously.  And they were ready to sew buttons all over Fritzing if buttons would make him happy.  This eagerness was very gratifying, but it was embarrassing as well.  The extremely aged and the extremely young were the only ones that refrained from offering their services.  Some of the girls were excluded as too weedy; some of the mothers because their babies were too new; some of the wives because their husbands were too exacting; but when Priscilla counted up the names she had written down she found there were twenty-five.  For a moment she was staggered.  Then she rose