‘No parties nor dances? Or were they too religious?’
‘Ma says it is their meanness; but my aunt, Lady Northmoor, did say perhaps it would be livelier another year, and then we should have had some dancing and deportment lessons. I up and told her I could dance fast enough now, but she said it
would not be becoming or right to Lady Adela’s and Miss Morton’s feelings.’
‘Do they live there?’
‘Not in the house. Lady Adela has a cottage of her own, and Miss Morton stops with her. Lady Adela is as high and standoffish as the monument,’ said Ida, pausing for a comparison.
‘High and haughty,’ said Sibyl, impressed. ‘And the other lady?’
‘Oh, she is much more good-natured. We call her Bertha; at least, she told us that we might call her anything but that horrid Cousin Bertha, as she said. But she’s old, thirty-six years old, and not a bit pretty, and she says such odd things, one doesn’t know what to do. She thought I made myself useful and could wash and iron,’ said Ida, as if this were the greatest possible insult, in which Sibyl acquiesced.
‘And she thought I should know the factory girls, just the hands,’ added Ida, greatly disgusted. ‘As if I should! But ma says low tastes are in the family, for she is going to live in London, and go and sit with the shop-girls in the evening. Still I like her better than Lady Adela, who keeps herself to herself. Mamma says it is pride and spite that her plain little sickly girl hasn’t come to be my Lady.’
‘What, doesn’t she speak to them?’ said Sibyl, quite excited.
‘Oh yes, she calls, and shakes hands, and all that, but one never seems to get on with her. And Emily Trotman, she’s the doctor’s daughter, such a darling, told me such a history—so interesting!’