“It does not signify much,” she again remarked; “it will be all the same a few years hence.”
“You've tired yourself to death with that mangle, I suppose?” said Palethorpe.
“Oh, no!” she exclaimed in a tone of voice which betrayed some slight offence at the vulgarity of his suggestion; “it is a very different sort of mangle to that. I am sure I am mangled enough by people's indifference.”
“Why, as for that,” replied Sammy, trying to exculpate himself from any charge of neglect, “you are meesis of the house, and don't want to be pressed to your meat and drink like a visiter.”
“Meat and drink!” she exclaimed, as though indignant that such animal ideas should degrade the present elevation of her soul, “I care nothing about meat and drink, not I. You seem as if you could see nothing, though people make the plainest allusions that female propriety allows any woman to make.”
Mr. Palethorpe looked astonished as he observed, “Well, I'm sure, meesis, you can't say that ever I made any allusions to female propriety.”
“No,—that's it! there it is!” sighed Miss Sowersoft: “though you get all the fat of the land, and are treated more like a gentleman in the house than like what you are, you never make the least allusions.”
Palethorpe protested that under those circumstances he ought to feel all the more ashamed of himself if he did make allusions, or else other people would think it very odd of him.
“Oh, then the truth's out at last, is it?” said Miss Sowersoft, “you have other people, have you? Ay, dear!” and she apparently fell a-crying. “It's impossible, then, for all the goodness in the world to make any impression. Oh!”
Saying which she rose up, with her handkerchief to her eyes, and walked towards the door, muttering as she went, that since he seemed so very fond of other people, other people might feed him, as that was the last posset he would ever have from her hands. Mr. Palethorpe endeavoured several times to recall her; but Miss Sowersoft's new jealousy of other people had rendered her inexorable; and, in the course of a few more seconds her own chamber-door was heard to be violently closed and to be most resolutely bolted and locked behind her. Our worthy uttered a discontented groan, and composed himself to sleep; an example which Colin was enabled to follow some long time after, though not before his weariness had completely overpowered his fears of danger from the savage sharer of his dormitory.