But it turned out that it wasn’t clothes she was wanting, at least, only as a side issue. Her main need was for a few weeks of fresh air, a happy home, plenty of good plain food and good influence (this last, she told me, was _most_ important, and that was why she had thought at once of coming to me) for a girl who had just had a bad break-down, through overwork and underfeeding in a cheap-class boarding house where she had been the maid of all work. Nothing the matter with her that you could put your finger on, but just a general slump—though Mrs. Griggles put it more choicely than that. The girl’s biographical data included: a grandmother who attended Mrs. Griggles’ mothers’ meeting regularly, though she had to hobble there, one of the cleanest and most respectful women you could ever hope to meet; a mother who had died in the Infirmary at her birth, a father who had never been forthcoming, and an upbringing in the workhouse schools. I hadn’t been exactly planning to take on an orphan at that time: they are proverbial for their appetites, and the butcher’s book hadn’t led my thoughts in that particular direction, any more than the dairyman’s weekly bill. All the same, when Mrs. Griggles showed me how plain my duty lay before me, naturally I said: “Send her and her grandmother round to see me this evening.” I was even more anxious to see the grandmother than the girl; for I had long ago given up all hope of ever meeting again such a phenomenon (or perhaps it should be phenomena, being feminine) as a woman who was clean as well as respectful! * * * * * They arrived promptly. The grandmother seemed a sensible, hard-working body, who had migrated from Devonshire to London when she married; for over forty years she had lived, or rather existed, in the back-drifts of our great city with never a glimpse of her native village. Yet—— On my writing table there stood a bowl of snowdrops, in a mass of sweet-scented frondy moss, with sprigs of the tiny-leaved ivy; they had arrived only that morning from the Flower-Patch among the hills. When she saw them, the old woman clasped her hands with genuine emotion. “Oh, ma’am, _how_ they ’mind me of when I was a girl!” she exclaimed. “And with that moss and all! Why, I can just feel my fingers getting all cold and damp as they used to when I did gather them in the lane ’long by our house—it seems on’y yesterday, that it do!” and tears actually came to her eyes. I decided on the spot that her granddaughter should have the freshest of air and the best of food (to say nothing of unlimited good influence) for the next month, at any rate.