The very small narrator touches the neck of the cleaning woman Maria, as she is on her hands and knees scrubbing floors (we don't know what she looks like standing up or if he could even reach her neck when she is standing). Her smile and his dream suggest to him that they might marry one day. He thinks of himself as an "attendant in her royal household"--an odd transformation of a cleaning woman into royalty, but perhaps no more exaggerated than his own dreams.