“Hanneh Hayyeh! You’re an artist!” There was reverence in Mrs. Preston’s low voice that pierced the other woman’s inmost being. “You do my laces and batistes as no one else ever has. It’s as if you breathed part of your soul into it.” The hungry-eyed, ghetto woman drank in thirstily the beauty and goodness that radiated from Mrs. Preston’s person. None of the cultured elegance of her adored friend escaped Hanneh Hayyeh. Her glance traveled from the exquisite shoes to the flawless hair of the well-poised head. “Your things got so much fineness. I’m crazy for the feel from them. I do them up so light in my hands like it was thin air I was handling.” Hanneh Hayyeh pantomimed as she spoke and Mrs. Preston, roused from her habitual reserve, put her fine, white hand affectionately over Hanneh Hayyeh’s gnarled, roughened ones. “Oi-i-i-i! Mrs. Preston! You always make me feel so grand!” said Hanneh Hayyeh, a mist of tears in her wistful eyes. “When I go away from you I could just sit down and cry. I can’t give it out in words what it is. It chokes me so--how good you are to me--You ain’t at all like a rich lady. You’re so plain from the heart. You make the lowest nobody feel he’s somebody.” “You are not a ‘nobody,’ Hanneh Hayyeh. You are an artist--an artist laundress.” “What mean you an artist?” “An artist is so filled with love for the beautiful that he has to express it in some way. You express it in your washing just as a painter paints it in a picture.” “Paint?” exclaimed Hanneh Hayyeh. “If you could only give a look how I painted up my kitchen! It lights up the whole tenement house for blocks around. The grocer and the butcher and all the neighbors were jumping in the air from wonder and joy when they seen how I shined up my house.” “And all in honor of Aby’s home-coming?” Mrs. Preston smiled, her thoughts for a moment on her own son, the youngest captain in his regiment whose home-coming had been delayed from week to week. “Everything I do is done for my Aby,” breathed Hanneh Hayyeh, her hands clasping her bosom as if feeling again the throb of his babyhood at her heart. “But this painting was already dreaming itself in my head for years. You remember the time the hot iron fell on my foot and you came to see me and brought me a red flower-pot wrapped around with green crêpe paper? That flower-pot opened up the sky in my kitchen.” The words surged from the seething soul of her. “Right away I saw before my eyes how I could shine up my kitchen like a parlor by painting the walls and sewing up new curtains for the window. It was like seeing before me your face every time I looked on your flowers. I used to talk to it like it could hear and feel and see. And I said to it: ‘I’ll show you what’s in me. I’ll show you that I know what beautiful is.’” Her face was aglow with an enthusiasm that made it seem young, like a young girl’s face.