This meant taking out the
contents of bureau drawers and wardrobes and putting them back again,
massing the litter on the big table in the living-room into an involved
geometry of neat piles that would endure for all of an hour,
straightening pictures on the walls, eliminating the home-circles of
spiders long unmolested, loudly calling upon Lew Wee, the Chinaman, who
affrightedly fled farther and farther after each call, and ever and
again booming pained surmises through the house as to what fearful state
it would get to be in if she didn't fight it to a clean finish once in a
dog's age.
The woman dumped a wastebasket of varied rubbish into the open fire,
leaned a broom against the mantel, readjusted the towel that protected
her gray hair from the dust--hair on week days exposed with never a
qualm to all manner of dust--cursed all Chinamen on land or sea with an
especial and piquant blight invoked upon the one now in hiding, then
took from the back of a chair where she had hung it the moment before a
riding skirt come to feebleness and decrepitude. She held it up before
critical eyes as one scanning the morning paper for headlines of
significance.
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