DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU

  PLEASE WASH OUT THE TUB AFTER YOU

Upon the outstanding occasion of the fly in the soup and Mr. Keller’s subsequent deathly illness, the regrettable immersion had been directly traceable, not to the kitchen, but to the dining-room ceiling.  It was November, a season of heavy dipterous mortality.  Besides, Mrs. Peopping had seen it fall.

Nor entered here the dirge of the soggy towel; Mrs. Plush placed fluffy stacks of them outside each door each morning.  Nor groggy coffee; Mrs. Plush was famous for hers.  Drip coffee, boiled up to an angry sea and half an eggshell dropped in like a fairy barque, to settle it.

The Jetts, with whom we have really to do, drank two cups apiece at breakfast.  Mrs. Jett, to the slight aid and abetment of one of her two rolls, stopped right there; Mr. Jett plunging on into choice-of—­

The second roll Mrs. Jett usually carried away with her from the table.  Along about ten o’clock she was apt to feel faint rather than hungry.

“Gone,” she called it.  “Feeling a little gone.”

Not that there was a suggestion of frailty about Mrs. Jett.  Anything but that.  On the contrary, in all the eight years in the boarding house, she held the clean record of not a day in bed, and although her history previous to that time showed as many as fifteen hours a day on duty in the little fancy-goods store of her own proprietorship, those years showed her guilty of only two incapacitated days, and then because she ran an embroidery needle under her finger nail and suffered a slight infection.

Yet there was something about Emma Jett—­eight years of married life had not dissipated it—­that was not eupeptic; something of the sear and yellow leaf of perpetual spinsterhood.  She was a wintry little body whose wide marriage band always hung loosely on her finger with an air of not belonging; wore an invariable knitted shawl iced with beads across her round shoulders, and frizzed her graying bangs, which, although fruit of her scalp, had a set-on look.  Even the softness to her kind gray eyes was cozy rather than warm.

She could look out tabbily from above a lap of handiwork, but in her boudoir wrapper of gray flannelette scalloped in black she was scrawny, almost rangy, like a horse whose ribs show.

“I can no more imagine those two courting,” Mrs. Keller, a proud twin herself and proud mother of twins, remarked one afternoon to a euchre group.  “They must have sat company by correspondence.  Why, they won’t even kiss when he comes home if there’s anybody in the room!”

“They kiss, all right,” volunteered Mrs. Dang of the bay-window alcove room, “and she waves him good-by every morning clear down the block.”

“You can’t tell about anybody nowadays,” vouchsafed some one, tremendously.

But in the end the consensus of opinion, unanimous to the vote, was:  Lovely woman, Mrs. Jett.