“I don’t understand myself what Mary White would be at,” said Mrs Greenways.
She stood waiting in the shop while Dimbleby thoughtfully weighed out some sugar for her; a stout woman with a round good-natured face, framed in a purple-velvet bonnet and nodding flowers; her long mantle matched the bonnet in stylishness, and was richly trimmed with imitation fur, but the large strong basket on her arm, already partly full of parcels, was quite out of keeping with this splendid attire. The two women who stood near, listening with eager respect to her remarks, were of very different appearance; their poor thin shawls were put on without any regard for fashion, and their straight cotton dresses were short enough to show their clumsy boots, splashed with mud from the miry country lanes. The edge of Mrs Greenways’ gown was also draggled and dirty, for she had not found it easy to hold it up and carry a large basket at the same time.
“I thought,” she went on, “as how Mary White was all for plain names, and homely ways, and such-like.”
“She do say so,” said the woman nearest to her, cautiously.
“Then, as I said to Greenways this morning, ‘It’s not a consistent act for your sister to name her child like that. Accordin’ to her you ought to have names as simple and common as may be.’ Why, think of what she said when I named my last, which is just a year ago. ‘And what do you think of callin’ her?’ says she. ‘Why,’ says I, ‘I think of giving her the name of Agnetta.’ ‘Dear me!’ says she; ‘whyever do you give your girls such fine names? There’s your two eldest, Isabella and Augusta; I’d call this one Betsy, or Jane, or Sarah, or something easy to say, and suitable.’”
“Did she, now?” said both the listeners at once.
“And it’s not only that,” continued Mrs Greenways with a growing sound of injury in her voice, “but she’s always on at me when she gets a chance about the way I bring my girls up. ‘You’d a deal better teach her to make good butter,’ says she, when I told her that Bella was learning the piano. And when I showed her that screen Gusta worked—lilies on blue satting, a re’lly elegant thing—she just turned her head and says, ‘I’d rather, if she were a gal of mine, see her knit her own stockings.’ Those were her words, Mrs Wishing.”
“Ah, well, it’s easy to talk,” replied Mrs Wishing soothingly, “we’ll be able to see how she’ll bring up a daughter of her own now.”
“I’m not saying,” pursued Mrs Greenways, turning a watchful eye on Mr Dimbleby’s movements, “that Mary White haven’t a perfect right to name her child as she chooses. I’m too fair for that, I hope. What I do say is, that now she’s picked up a fancy sort of name like Lilac, she hasn’t got any call to be down on other people. And if me and Greenways likes to see our girls genteel and give ’em a bit of finishing eddication, and set ’em off with a few accomplishments, it’s our own affair and not Mary White’s. And though I say it as shouldn’t, you won’t find two more elegant gals than Gusta and Bella, choose where you may.”