"Shoor I did! An' it's the livin' truth. What's the matter with that? Believe _me_, you wasn't good for more than a minit or two more on your legs, when I got you into your bed that blessed night. You was clean bowled over, an' you couldn't 'a' walked another step if you'd been killed for it. Didn't I nurse you them days you was in bed, helplesslike as a baby? Didn't I nurse you till you could walk?" "Indeed you did. And that's precisely the point!" said Claire. "If Mr. Ronald--if Mrs. Sherman knew the truth, that I was poor, homeless, without a friend in New York the night you picked me up on the street, and carried me home and cared for me without knowing a thing about me, they mightn't--they _wouldn't_ have taken me into their house and given me their little boy to train. And because they wouldn't, I want to tell them. I want to square myself. I ought to have told them long ago. I want--" "You want 'em to bounce you," observed Mrs. Slawson calmly. "Well, there's always more'n one way of lookin' at things. For instance any good chambermaid, _with experience_, will tell you there's three ways of dustin'. The first is, do it thora, wipin' the rungs o' the chairs, an' the backs o' the pictures, an' under the books on the table like. The second is, just sorter flashin' your rag over the places that shows, an' the third is--pull down the shades. They're all good enough ways in their own time an' place, an' you foller them accordin' to your disposition or, if you're nacherelly particular, accordin' to the other things you got to do, in the time you got to do 'em _in_. Now, _I'm_ particular. I'm the nacherelly thora kind, but if I'm pressed, an' there's more important things up to me than the dustin', I give it a lick an' a promise, same as the next one, an' let it go at that, till the time comes I can do better. Life's too short to fuss an' fidget your soul out over trifles. It ain't always what you _want_, but what you _must_. You sometimes got to cut short at one end so's you can piece out at another, an' you can take it from me, you only pester folks by gettin' 'm down where they can't resist you, an' forcin' a lot of hard facks down their throats, which ain't the _truth_ anyhow, an' which they don't want to swaller on no account. What do they care about the machinery, so long as it turns out the thing they want? Believe _me_, it's foolishness to try to get 'em back into the works, pokin' about among the inside wheels an' springs, an' so forth. You likely get knocked senseless by some big thing-um-bob you didn't know was there. Now I know just eggsackly what's in your mind, but you're wrong. You think I told Mr. Ronald fibs. I didn't tell'm fibs. I just give'm the truth the way he'd take it, like you give people castor-oil that's too dainty to gullup it down straight. Some likes it in lemon, an' some in grobyules, but it's castor-oil all the same. He wanted to know the truth about you, an' I let him have it, the truth bein' you're as fine