“I shall be glad to show you my rooms,” said Mrs. Leighton, with an irrelevant sigh.  “You must excuse their being not just as I should wish them.  We’re hardly settled yet.”

“Don’t speak of it, madam,” said the gentleman, “if you can overlook the trouble we awe giving you at such an unseasonable houah.”

“Ah’m a hoasekeepah mahself,” Miss Woodburn joined in, “and Ah know ho’ to accyoant fo’ everything.”

Mrs. Leighton led the way up-stairs, and the young lady decided upon the large front room and small side room on the third story.  She said she could take the small one, and the other was so large that her father could both sleep and work in it.  She seemed not ashamed to ask if Mrs. Leighton’s price was inflexible, but gave way laughing when her father refused to have any bargaining, with a haughty self-respect which he softened to deference for Mrs. Leighton.  His impulsiveness opened the way for some confidence from her, and before the affair was arranged she was enjoying in her quality of clerical widow the balm of the Virginians’ reverent sympathy.  They said they were church people themselves.

“Ah don’t know what yo’ mothah means by yo’ hoase not being in oddah,” the young lady said to Alma as they went down-stairs together.  “Ah’m a great hoasekeepah mahself, and Ah mean what Ah say.”

They had all turned mechanically into the room where the Leightons were sitting when the Woodburns rang:  Mr. Woodburn consented to sit down, and he remained listening to Mrs. Leighton while his daughter bustled up to the sketches pinned round the room and questioned Alma about them.

“Ah suppose you awe going to be a great awtust?” she said, in friendly banter, when Alma owned to having done the things.  “Ah’ve a great notion to take a few lessons mahself.  Who’s yo’ teachah?”

Alma said she was drawing in Mr. Wetmore’s class, and Miss Woodburn said:  “Well, it’s just beautiful, Miss Leighton; it’s grand.  Ah suppose it’s raght expensive, now?  Mah goodness! we have to cyoant the coast so much nowadays; it seems to me we do nothing but cyoant it.  Ah’d like to hah something once without askin’ the price.”

“Well, if you didn’t ask it,” said Alma, “I don’t believe Mr. Wetmore would ever know what the price of his lessons was.  He has to think, when you ask him.”

“Why, he most be chomming,” said Miss Woodburn.  “Perhaps Ah maght get the lessons for nothing from him.  Well, Ah believe in my soul Ah’ll trah.  Now ho’ did you begin? and ho’ do you expect to get anything oat of it?” She turned on Alma eyes brimming with a shrewd mixture of fun and earnest, and Alma made note of the fact that she had an early nineteenth-century face, round, arch, a little coquettish, but extremely sensible and unspoiled-looking, such as used to be painted a good deal in miniature at that period; a tendency of her brown hair to twine and twist at the temples helped the effect; a high comb would have completed