Waking brought an hour of sweet and bitter things to the girl; washing and dressing the boy was almost wholly sweet, and never before had that sunny child of love been so laughed over and kissed. The Capsina showed what was to the experienced mother the strangest ignorance of the infant toilet, and even the adorable creases in his own pink skin and the ever-new wonder of his ten divisible and individual toes palled in grave interest to the owner before these new and original methods. Sweeter even than that was the unprompted staccato, "Cap-sin-a, Cap-sin-a," "like a silly parrot," so said Suleima. Indeed, the girl was truly a woman, though the profound judge, Mitsos, had given her a sex all to herself, and the little household duties so lovingly done by Suleima were a keen pleasure to her to watch and assist in. And after they had breakfasted she still lingered. "Let me wait a little longer," she said to Suleima; "but I will not wait unless you promise to do all you would do if I was not here." So Suleima, to whom the mending and patching of Mitsos's clothes was a Danaid labor, went into the house, and came out again on to the veranda with an armful of his invalid linen. There were holes to be patched in trousers, tears to be sewn in shirts, and places worn thin to be pieced. "This is what I do when I have nought else to do," she said. "Yet if I had twenty hands, and no work for any of them, I believe I should never get to the end. The great loon seems never to sit down except as on a nail. Last month only he put his pipe, all alight, into his coat-pocket. Right through the lining went the burn, and right through his shirt, and he never knew it until the fire nipped him." The Capsina laughed. "How like him! Oh, how very like him!" she said. "May I help you? Yet, indeed, I think I have forgotten how to sew." Suleima gave her a shirt to mend, off the arm of which Mitsos had torn a great piece--"as like as not to light the pipe that burned him," said his wife--and a very poor job she made of it. She held it up to Suleima in deprecating dismay when she had finished it, and Suleima laughed to choking. "No, you shall not better it," she said, as the Capsina prepared to rip off the piece again. "Indeed, it shall stop as it is, and Mitsos shall wear it like that. He shall know who did it, and then perhaps he will think the higher of my fingers." And she snatched it out of the Capsina's hands and ran with it into the house, where she put it among the finished linen, where he should find it, and stare in wonder at this preposterous housewifery. The Capsina had not tried her hand at any further job when she returned, and presently after she rose.