She looked at me odd and cool. “Why,” she said, “my dear Miss Marsh, it’s being in here that gives ’em the leisure to make the things at all!” What was the use of talking to her? And besides being unreasonable, she was one of them that you’re awful put to it to keep from being able not to right down dislike. And I went along the passage thinking: “She acts like the way things are is the way things ought to be. But it always seems to me that the way things ought to be is the best way things could be. For the earth ain’t so full of the fulness thereof but that we could all do something to make it a little more so.” And then the thing happened that opened the door to all I’d been thinking about, and let me slip through inside. Being I was there, I dropped in a minute to see old Grandma Stuart. She was one of the eighty “inmates.” Up in the ward where she was sitting, there were twenty beds. And between each two beds was a shelf and a washbasin, and over it a hook. And old Grandma Stuart sat there by her bed and her shelf and her hook. She was old and white, and she had fine wrinkles, like a dead flower. She drew me down to her, with her cold hands. “Miss Marsh,” she said, “I got two-three things.” “Yes,” I says, “well, that’s nice,” I says. And wondered if that was the right thing to say to her. “But I ain’t got any box,” she says. “They keep the things and bring ’em to us clean every time. And I ain’t got any box.” “That’s so, you ain’t,” says I, looking at her shelf. “I put my things in my dress,” she says, “but they always fall out. And I’ve got to stop to pick ’em up. And _she_ don’t like it.” No. The matron wouldn’t like it. I knew that. She was one of them that the thing was the thing even if it was something else. “And so I thought,” says Grandma Stuart, “that if I had a pocket, I could put my things in that. I thought they wouldn’t fall out if I had a pocket. _She_ says she can’t be making pockets for every one. But I keep thinking if I had a pocket.... It’s these things I’ve got,” she says. She took from her dress three things: A man’s knife, a child’s ring, and a door-key. “It was the extry key to my house,” she said. “I--brought it along. And I thought if I had a pocket....”