“I don’t want no strangers, Miss,” said Betty with a darkening face, “they break more than they make. I can make shift, I daresay, with my left hand.”
“Now you know that’s quite out of the question, Betty,” said her mistress, doing her best to speak severely, “you couldn’t lift a saucepan, or even make a bed. You must certainly have someone. Some nice respectable char-woman.”
“There’s ne’er a one in the town,” said Betty, “as you’d like to have in the house. I know what they are—a lazy gossiping set.”
Miss Unity rose with decision.
“I shall go and ask Mrs Margetts at the College to tell me of someone trustworthy,” she said, “and I do beg, Betty, that you will go at once to the doctor.”
But though she spoke with unusual firmness Miss Unity was inwardly very much disturbed, and she quite trembled as she put on her bonnet and started off to see old Nurse. For Betty, like many faithful old servants, was most difficult to manage sometimes. She had ruled Miss Unity’s house single-handed so long that she could not endure the idea of help, or “strangers in the kitchen,” as she called it. Miss Unity had never dared to suggest such a thing until now, and she felt very doubtful as to its success, for she foresaw little peace in the house for some time to come. Complaints, quarrels, changes, wounded feelings on Betty’s part, and so on; a constant worry in the air which would be most distressing to anyone of an orderly and quiet mind. Poor Miss Unity sighed heavily as she reached the College and climbed Nurse’s steep staircase.
Nurse was full of sympathy, but before she could bring her mind to the question of charwomen she had to go over all her experience of sprains and what was best for them—how some said this, and some said exactly the opposite, and how she herself, after trying all the remedies, had finally been cured by some stuff which folks called a quack medicine, but she thought none the worse of it for that. Miss Unity sat patiently and politely listening to all this, and at last gently repeated:
“And do you know of a respectable woman, Mrs Margetts, who would come in and help Betty for a time?”
Nurse shook her head. “There’s no one, I’m afraid, Miss, not one that Betty would like to have. You see she’s rather particular, and if a person isn’t just so, as one might say, it puts her out.”
Miss Unity knew that only too well.