“No; I mean his mother.”
“I am getting bewildered!” said Barbara.
“No wonder, miss! You'll be more bewildered yet when I tell you all!” She was silent. Barbara saw she was feeling faint.
“What a brute I am to make you talk!” she cried, and ran to fetch her a cup of milk, which she made her drink slowly.
“I must tell you everything!” said Alice, after lying a moment or two silent.
“You shall to-morrow,” said Barbara.
“No; I must now, please! I must tell you about Richard!”
“Have you known him a long time?”
“I call him Richard,” said Alice, “because my brother does. They were at school together. But it is only of late—not a year ago, that I began to know him. He came to see Arthur once, and then I went with Arthur to see him and his people. But his mother behaved very strangely to me, and asked me a great many questions that I thought she had no business to ask me. Before that, I had noticed that she kept looking from Arthur to Richard, and from Richard to Arthur, in the oddest way; I couldn't make it out. Then she asked me to go to her bedroom with her, and there she told me. She was very rough to me, I thought, but I must say the tears were in her own eyes! She said she could not have Richard keeping company with us, for she knew what my mother was, and who my father was, and we were not respectable people, and it would never do. If she heard of Richard going to our house once again, she would have to do something we shouldn't like. Then she cried quite, and said she was sorry to hurt me, for I seemed a good girl, and it wasn't my fault, but she couldn't help it; the thing would be a mischief. And there she stopped as if she had said too much already. You may be sure I thought myself ill-used, and Arthur worse; for we both liked Richard, though my mother didn't think him at all our equal, or fit to be a companion to Arthur; for Arthur was a clerk, while Richard worked with his hands. Arthur said he worked with his hands too, and turned out far poorer work than Richard—stupid figures instead of beautiful books; and I said I worked with my needle quite as hard as Richard with his tools; but it had no effect on my mother: her ways of looking at things are not the same as ours, because she was born a lady. Why don't a lady have ladies, Barbara?”
“Never you mind, Alice! Every good woman will be a lady one day—I am sure of that! It was cruel to treat you so! How anybody belonging to Richard could do it, I can't think; he's so gentle and good himself!”