"I'm afraid I can't do that, and prove it afterwards."
"Then you ain't worth anything to me." Having so declared, Lady Linlithgow went on with her accounts and Lucy relapsed into her great poem.
"No, my dear," said the countess, when she had completed her work. "There isn't anything for you to do. I hope you haven't come here with that mistaken idea. There won't be any sort of work of any kind expected from you. I poke my own fires, and I carve my own bit of mutton. And I haven't got a nasty little dog to be washed. And I don't care twopence about worsted work. I have a maid to darn my stockings, and because she has to work, I pay her wages. I don't like being alone, so I get you to come and live with me. I breakfast at nine, and if you don't manage to be down by that time, I shall be cross."
"I'm always up long before that."
"There's lunch at two,—just bread and butter and cheese, and perhaps a bit of cold meat. There's dinner at seven;—and very bad it is, because they don't have any good meat in London. Down in Fifeshire the meat's a deal better than it is here, only I never go there now. At half-past ten I go to bed. It's a pity you're so young, because I don't know what you'll do about going out. Perhaps, as you ain't pretty, it won't signify."
"Not at all, I should think," said Lucy.
"Perhaps you consider yourself pretty. It's all altered now since I was young. Girls make monsters of themselves, and I'm told the men like it;—going about with unclean, frowsy structures on their heads, enough to make a dog sick. They used to be clean and sweet and nice,—what one would like to kiss. How a man can like to kiss a face with a dirty horse's tail all whizzing about it, is what I can't at all understand. I don't think they do like it, but they have to do it."
"I haven't even a pony's tail," said Lucy.
"They do like to kiss you, I daresay."
"No, they don't," ejaculated Lucy, not knowing what answer to make.