'Why, Ross, I couldn't do anything else? You don't mind Mr Williams coming, do you?' Suddenly his Irish grandmother came on top, and he exploded violently and unexpectedly in that way he has.
'What a system,' he stormed, 'what a church, that can so sweat its ministers that their families have not enough to eat, and gentlefolk are reduced to wearing other people's old clothes and being glad to get them. It's enough to make one sick, and I suppose they call it "holy poverty." It wouldn't make me feel very holy to see my wife hoping some beastly society would send her an old nightgown and have the cheek to call it charity. Surely if it's necessary to help the clergy at all we ought to give the best we can, as if we were giving to Him. Anyway, I won't have you give Mrs Williams your old clothes, Meg. If it wasn't that Michael was so disgustingly well off it might be you. Thank goodness I've got plenty of money; here, buy her all she wants and if it isn't enough tell me,' and he pitched into my astonished hands all the loose money from his pockets and a note-case stuffed with notes. 'And then you ask me if I mind,' he stormed, 'when the boot is on the other leg. He may mind meeting me. I wasn't decently civil when he called the other day, sneered at him because he looked unbrushed, when he'd probably been up all night. Why, I'm not fit to black his boots. It's all my accursed temper and my damnable pride.' And he flung out of the nursery into his own room and slammed the door.
'Oh, Nannie,' I said, 'isn't he funny? he hasn't been in such a bate for years; of course I never meant to give her my old clothes.'
'Of course you didn't, dearie, he'll remember in a minute, don't you fret.'
'Shall I go after him and tell him so?'
'Oh, I should let him bide, poor lamb.'
'So I let him 'bide,' though anything less like a lamb than Ross at that moment wasn't conceivable.
We smuggled out some nighties, so that the maids shouldn't see, and a blue dressing-gown, and a little quilted coat to match, and some soft blue shoes, and a cap or two, and a shawl and pretty things like that to suit an invalid, and when I got to Mrs Williams's house I packed them all in her own suit-case and brought her in a cab to Gidger's Cottage.
Nannie solemnly unpacked for her, and said,—
'How pretty your things are, ma'am, if you won't think it a liberty for me to say so,' which was considerably more tactful than my remark about the nighties. And the invalid blushed quite nicely and looked at me reprovingly.