"Do you wish you was back there, too?" asked homesick Druse, wistfully. Druse could no more take root in the city than could a partridge-berry plant, set in the flinty earth of the back-yard.
"Wish I was back? Yes, if I could go back where I used to live," said Miss De Courcy with her hoarse, abrupt little laugh. "No, I don't either. Folks are pretty much all devils, city or country."
Druse shivered a little. She looked up with dumb pleading into the reckless, beautiful face she had learned to love so well from her humble tendings and ministerings. She had the nature to love where she served. She had no words to say, but Miss De Courcy turned away from the sorrowful, puzzled eyes of forget-me-not blue, the sole beauty of the homely, irregular little face.
"I was only a-joking, Druse," she added, smiling. "Come, let's make some lemonade."
But Druse did not forget these and other words. She pondered over them as she lay in her stifling little dark bedroom at night, or attended to her work by day, and she waged many an imaginary battle for the beautiful, idle woman who represented the grace of life to her.
The fat janitress sometimes stopped to gossip a moment with Druse.
"Ever seen Miss De Courcy on your floor?" she asked, one day, curiously.
"Yes, ma'am, I--I've seen her," replied Druse, truthfully, the color rising to her pale cheeks.
"O Lord!" ejaculated the janitress, heaving a portentous sigh from the depths of her capacious, brown calico-covered bosom, "if I was the owner of these here flats, instead of the old miser that's got 'em, wouldn't I have a clearin' out! Wouldn't I root the vice and wickedness out of some of 'em! Old Lowder don't care what he gits in here, so long's they pay their rent!"
Druse did not reply. She felt sure that the janitress meant Miss De Courcy's drunken brother, and she was very glad that "old Lowder" was not so particular, for she shuddered to think how lonely she should be were it not for the back flat to the right. Even the janitress, who seemed so kind, was heartless to Miss De Courcy because she had a drunken brother!
Druse began to find the world very, very cruel. The days went on, and the two lives, so radically unlike, grew closer entwined. Druse lost none of her stern, angular little ways. She did not learn to lounge, or to desire fine clothing. If either changed, an observer, had there been one, might have noticed that Miss De Courcy did not need as much medicine as formerly, that the hard ring of her laugh was softened when Druse went by, and that never an oath--and we have heard that ladies of the highest rank have been known to swear under strong provocation--escaped the full red lips in Druse's presence.