"There are more things I should like to do for you than you would think to ask .-- In fact," she added, looking round with a loving smile, "I don't know what I shouldn't like to do for you." "My meaning was, that, as a thing of course, I should never ask you to do anything menial," explained Hesper, venturing a little further still, and now speaking in a tone perfectly matter-of-fact.
"I don't know what you intend by _menial_," returned Mary.
Hesper thought it not unnatural she should not be familiar with the word, and proceeded to explain it as well as she could.

That seeming ignorance may be the consequence of more knowledge, she had yet to learn.
"_Menial_, don't you know ?" she said, "is what you give servants to do." But therewith she remembered that Mary's help in certain things wherein her maid's incapacity was harrowing, was one of the hopes she mainly cherished in making her proposal: that definition of _menial_ would hardly do.
"I mean--I mean," she resumed, with a little embarrassment, a rare thing with her, "-- things like--like--cleaning one's shoes, don't you know ?--or brushing your hair." Mary burst out laughing.
"Let me come to you to-morrow morning," she said, "and I will brush your hair that you will want me to come again the next day.

You beautiful creature! whose hands would not be honored to handle such stuff as that ?" As she spoke, she took in her fingers a little stray drift from the masses of golden twilight that crowned one of the loveliest temples in which the Holy Ghost had not yet come to dwell.
"If cleaning your shoes be menial, brushing your hair must be royal," she added.
Hesper's heart was touched; and if at the same time her _self_ was flattered, the flattery was mingled with its best antidote--love.
"Do you really mean," she said, "you would not mind doing such things for me ?--Of course I should not be exacting." She laughed again, afraid of showing herself too much in earnest before she was sure of Mary.
"You would not ask me to do anything _menial_ ?" said Mary, archly.
"I dare not promise," said Hesper, in tone responsive.

"How could I help it, if I saw you longing to do what I was longing to have you do ?" she added, growing more and more natural.
"I would no more mind cleaning your boots than my own," said Mary.
"But I should not like to clean my own boots," rejoined Hesper.
"No more should I, except it had to be done.

Even then I would much rather not," returned Mary, "for cleaning my own would not interest me.
To clean yours would.