The kitchen was full of a peculiar sweetish smell, by which Keith knew without looking that Granny was dressing the old wound on her left leg that had developed “the rose” and would not heal.  She was leaning far over, busy with a bandage which she wound tightly about her leg, from the ankle to the knee.  The boy sniffed the familiar smell with a vague sense of discomfort, which, however, did not prevent him from going up to the grandmother and putting one arm about her neck.

“Old hurt is hard to mend,” she muttered quoting one of the old saws always on her lips.  Then without raising her head, she added in the peevish, truculent tone of a thwarted child:  “You had better go back in there before they come and get you.  I am nothing but a servant, and as such I know my place and keep it.  I am less than a servant, for they wouldn’t dare do to Lena what they do to me.”

“Oh, yes, they would,” Lena put in from across the room.  “And they would have a right, too.”

As if she had not heard at all, Granny sat up straight and looked hard at the boy.

“Whatever you do, Keith,” she said, and he noticed that her voice sounded a little strange, “see that you make a lot of money when you grow up.  To be poor is to have no rights, and the worst thing of all is to be dependent on others, no matter how near they are to you.”

“I think Mrs. Carlsson is very ungrateful,” said Lena.  “There are thousands of old people who would give anything to have a nice home and nothing to worry over.”

“Anybody can talk, but it takes a head to keep silent,” said Granny impersonally, quoting another old saw.  Then her manner changed abruptly and she turned to Keith effusively.

“Give me a kiss!  You love your old Granny, don’t you?  You don’t despise her, do you, because she has nothing and is nothing?  And can be sure she loves you more than anybody else.”

The boy’s feelings were so mixed that he really could not feel anything at all.  His arm was still about the grandmother’s neck, mechanically he gave her the kiss she asked for, but it was with real relief he saw his mother open the door to the living-room and responded to her demand that he go to bed at once.

XI

Hardly any memory left behind by Keith’s childhood was more acute than the image of Granny seated in the centre of the kitchen, her stolid, yet pleasant old face bent over some household task, and her whole figure instinct with a passive protest against her enforced dependency or, maybe against life’s arbitrariness in general.  One moment she seemed to be brooding deeply, and the next she looked as if there was not a thought in her head.  For one reason or another, her anomalous position and peculiar attitude occupied Keith’s mind a great deal, and many of the questions with which he plied his mother were concerned with Granny.  They were fairly discreet as a rule, but on the morning after the scene just described, some impulse of which he had no clear understanding made him perplex his mother with the abrupt question: