"And what do you suppose will happen?"
"Mother and Molly will cry, and Emmy will make an oration which I shall interrupt, and Kezzy will open her eyes at such a monster, and father will want to horsewhip me, but restrain himself and turn me from the door. Or perhaps he will lock me up—oh Patty, cannot you see that I'm weeping, not joking? But it has to be done, and I am going to be brave and do it."
"Very well, then. Now listen to me.—You cannot."
"Cannot? Why?"
"There's no room, to begin with—not a bed in the house. Sam and his wife are there, and the child, on a visit."
"Sam there! And you never told me.—Oh, Pat, Pat, and I might have missed him!" She sprang up from the bed and began her dressing in a fever of haste.
"But what will you do?"
"Go home and find Sam, of course."
"I don't see how Sam can help you. He did not help Emmy much: and his wife will be there, remember."
There was no love lost between Sam's sisters and Sam's wife—a practical little woman with a sharp tongue and a settled conviction that her husband's relatives were little better than lunatics. She understood the Rectory's strict rules of conduct as little as its feckless poverty (for so she called it). That a household which held its head so high should be content with a parlour furnished like a barn, sit down to meals scarcely better than the day-labourers' about them, and rest ignored by families of decent position in the neighbourhood, puzzled and irritated her. "Better he paid his debts and fed his children," was her answer when Sam put in a word for his father's spiritual ambitions. Her slight awe of the Wesleys' abilities—even she could not deny them brains—only drove her to entrench herself more strongly behind her practical wisdom; and she never abandoned her position (which had saved her in a thousand domestic arguments) that her sisters-in-law had been trained as savages in the wilds. She had a habit of addressing them as children: and her interference, some years before, between Emilia and young Leybourne, had been conducted by letter addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Wesley and without pretence of consulting Emilia's feelings.