"I guess I'll have to leave to-day," she had said. "I'm going back to the factory." "Why?" "I can't have nobody giving me board and room for nothing. I always paid for what I got." She began to pack her scant belongings in the little room on the third floor next to Hulda's. A council was summoned. It was agreed that Jeannette should help with the household tasks; assist Hulda with the dishes; flip-flop the mattresses; clean the silver, perhaps. This silver-cleaning was one of Mrs. Payson's fixed ideas. It popped into her mind whenever she saw Hulda momentarily idle. Hulda did endless yards of coarse and hideous tatting and crocheting intended ultimately for guimpes, edgings, bands and borders on nightgowns, corset covers, and pillow slips. Pressed, she admitted an Oscar in the offing. She had mounds of stout underwear, crochet-edged, in her queer old-world trunk. When, in a leisure hour, she sat in her room or in the orderly kitchen she was always busy with a gray and grimy ball of this handiwork. Mrs. Payson would slam in and out of the kitchen. "There she sits, doing nothing. Crocheting!" "But mother," Lottie would say, "her work's all done. The kitchen's like a pin. She cleaned the whole front of the house to-day. It isn't time to start dinner." "Let her clean the silver, then." Jeannette ate her meals with Hulda and before a week had passed she had banished the grubby and haphazard feeding off one end of the kitchen table. She got hold of a rickety old table in the basement, straightened its wobbly legs, painted it white, and set it up against the kitchen wall under the window facing the back yard. In a pantry drawer she found a faded lunch cloth of the Japanese variety, with bluebirds on it. This she spread for their meals. They had proper knives, forks, and spoons. The girl was friendly, good-natured, helpful. Hulda could not resent her--even welcomed her companionship in that rather grim household. Hulda showed Jeannette her dream-book without which no Swedish houseworker can exist; told her her dreams in detail. "It vos like I vos walking and yet I didn't come nowheres. It seems like I vos in Chicago and same time it vos old country where I ban come from and all the flowers vos blooming in fields and all of sudden a old man comes walking and I look and it vos----" etc., ad lib.