She was just sitting down to her dinner at three o’clock in the afternoon of a torrid day. The reek of roast duck and sage and onions was succulently in the air, and there was a tankard of porter facing and winking amber bubbles beside her plate already.
“Drat!” Mrs. Tabbishaw took a gulp of the porter, and waddled to the door to scream: “Those blue feathers, where the deuce were they put? Pamela! Pamela! I say, where is that girl? My chest is wore out screeching for her. Where’s Pamela, Miss Trotter, dear?”
“Just a-setting down to bread-and-cheese in the scullery,” screamed a thin voice from the counting-house.
“Setting down! It’s like her impidence! Send for her this moment, Miss Trotter. Tell her she’s got to take my Lady Kilcroney’s blue feathers to Hertford Street this very minute. Tell her it’s pressing, Miss Trotter. And stay, look out my lady’s bill, which Miss Pounce promised me to have settled this while back, and it twelve pound odd. Tell the chit to ask her aunt for it. I’m none too fond of letting fine ladies’ bills run up, and it all for odds and ends that are scarce worth my doing. And, hark ye, tell her she’ll have to hurry back too, with that pinking to finish to-night for Mrs. Alderman Gruntle’s cradle, and her eleventh due any time.”
“For mercy’s sake, Aunt Lydia,” said Pamela Pounce, as much to that damsel’s surprise and annoyance she was ushered in upon her by Pompey, the black page. “Give me a bit of bread-and-butter, and a drink of Bohea, for I declare to Heaven I’m starving. And I’ve brought you the feathers. And they’re dyed a dreadful blue, I think; but once you give anything over to Mrs. Tabbishaw you get the mark of her paw upon it, and so I tell you.”
“’Twould be well if she put the mark of her paw upon you, miss, for your impidence. Bread-and-butter, quotha! And I’m sure ’tis a good thing if you are a trifle fined down from the gross size you was when you came back from Paris. ‘Dear me,’ says my lord’s new man to me, when he caught sight of you, ‘that’s a prize one! She’d make ten of you,’ he says; and him so genteel, I blushed to hear him.”
“Oh, that fellow!” Pounce the younger tossed her head; “waylaying me on the stairs to say I couldn’t be a Pounce, being so—well, so vastly different from you, Aunt Lydia. And begging to see me home; as if I’d let him—a valet, indeed!”
“Upon my word!” Lydia’s faded, sallow, pretty countenance went a trifle more sallow, and looked considerably less pretty. “Who’s to talk of impidence, I’d like to know, and what do you expect, miss?”
“Somebody considerably less like stripes and buttons. If I don’t get a gentleman one day, Aunt——”