‘And I told Mr. Dusautoy that I should give you none.’
‘Oh! that is hard.’
‘If you could have heard him! He thought he had got a working lady at last, and he would have had no mercy upon you. One would have imagined that Mr. Kendal had brought you here for his sole behoof!’
‘Then I shall look to you, Mr. Dusautoy.’
‘No, I believe she is quite right,’ he said. ‘She says you ought to undertake nothing till you have had time to see what leisure you have to give us.’
‘Nay, I have been used to think the parish my business, home my leisure.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Dusautoy, ‘but then you were the womankind of the clergy, now you are a laywoman.’
‘I think you have work at home,’ said the Vicar.
‘Work, but not work enough!’ cried Albinia. ‘The girls will help me; only tell me what I may do.’
‘I say, “what you can,”’ said Mrs. Dusautoy. ‘You see before you a single-handed man. Only two of the ladies here can be called coadjutors, one being poor little Genevieve Durant, the other the bookseller’s daughter, Clarissa Richardson, who made all the rest fly off. All the others do what good they mean to do according to their own sweet will, free and independent women, and we can’t have any district system, so I think you can only do what just comes to hand.’