"Go away!" she said. And again that gesture.
I felt myself choking. "She is hungry," I whispered.
My mother measured out the tonic.
My first misgiving about her shook the foundations of existence. Other, lesser instances, came back to me—strange lapses into hardness on the part of so tender a being. What did they mean? If I scratched my arm, she would fly for a soothing lotion, and help healing with soft words. If Bettina pinched her finger, the whole house would be stirred up to sympathise. No smallest ache or ailing of ours but our mother's sensitiveness shared. And yet....
The woman with her burden had moved away—a draggled figure in the rain.
A horrible feeling sprang up in my heart—an impulse of actual hatred towards my mother—as the hop-picker disappeared.
Hatred of Bettina, too.
I kept thinking of the pudding in the fire. And of Martha Loring. If Martha Loring had been in the kitchen, she would somehow have got food to the woman, and a few pence. The image of Martha Loring shone bright above the greyness of that wretched time.
Looking back, I say to myself: "Not all in vain, perhaps, the life of the little servant who had been turned out of doors." At Duncombe, where she had had her time of happiness, where she had served and suffered, something of her spirit still survived.
Martha Loring sat that day in judgment on my mother. And I was torn with the misery of having to admit the sentence just.