And last of all there was the subterranean and gloomy kitchen, in which there had lived that long succession of serving-maids of whom we gain shadowy glimpses in the Letters and in the Journal. Poor souls, dwellers in the gloom, working so hard for others, so bitterly reviled when by chance some weakness of humanity comes to break, for an instant, the routine of their constant labour, so limited in their hopes and in their pleasures, they are of all folk upon this planet those for whom a man’s heart may most justly soften. So said Frank as he gazed around him in the dark-cornered room. ‘And never one word of sympathy for them, or of anything save scorn in all his letters. His pen upholding human dignity, but where was the dignity of these poor girls for whom he has usually one bitter line of biography in his notes to his wife’s letters? It’s the worst thing I have against him.’
‘Jemima wouldn’t have stood it,’ said Maude.
It was pleasant to be out in the open air once more, but they were in the pine groves of Woking before Maude had quite shaken off the gloom of that dark, ghost-haunted house. ‘After all, you are only twenty-seven,’ she remarked as they walked up from the station. She had a way of occasionally taking a subject by the middle in that way.
‘What then, dear?’
‘When Carlyle was only twenty-seven I don’t suppose he knew he was going to do all this.’
‘No, I don’t suppose so.’
‘And his wife—if he were married then—would feel as I do to you.’
‘No doubt.’
‘Then what guarantee have I that you won’t do it after all?’
‘Do what?’