“I cannot imagine where you have acquired it, but you have a wonderful way with these folk,” exclaimed Lord Mulgrave. “How do you know what is just the right thing to say?”
“It’s like this, you see: although I am so awkward and flurried in fine society, and make such awful mistakes—you remember how I shook hands with the head gamekeeper at Lord Dover’s, and walked out of the room before the Duchess—I am really at home with the poor. I can enter into their feelings, for I have lived with them all my life. They are the same all the world over, only they talk differently.”
“Then in that case you shall be my Lady Bountiful and take on the cottage hospital, the school, and the almshouses. Her ladyship does not care for the people; she never visits them; she says they are uninteresting, grasping, and thankless.”
“Well, some are! They can’t help it. I knew a funny old woman at home; and once, when a lady gave her a nice stout serge, she just whimpered and said, ‘And what about the elegant little grey dress ye had in the spring—where is that?’”
Lord Mulgrave laughed and she resumed: “But, after all, we should not be looking for thanks; some of them have so little, and we have so much.”
“You talk like your mother, my dear. She was always on the side of the poor.”
“Oh, father”—and she blushed vividly—“you make me so happy when you tell me that I am like her in other ways besides looks. Of course I can talk to the people, because I was one of them for so many years. Yet, somehow, these English are different—they are all ladies.”
“Good gracious, Joseline! What do you mean?”
“I’ll explain if I can. Now there is Mrs. Gillson, a widow-woman; I asked her to come up yesterday, and I would find her some warm clothes, but she said, ‘I cannot come to-morrow, for a lady I’ve worked for regular every Wednesday this three years will expect me. I do her washing, and the lady always puts the clothes in soak of a Tuesday, and gives me a hand herself, so I really could not disoblige her!’”