“But there was one thing I should like to tell you, ma’am.”
Aunt Anne was burning with curiosity, but she raised her hand.
“Not another word, Maria. You know I never listen to the servants’ tattle. Now go about your work.”
“I ’ate her,” muttered Maria, as soon as she was in the hall, which she crossed so as to get to the back stairs; “and if I haven’t put a spoke in her wheel this time my name isn’t what it is.”
Maria tightened her lips as if to condense her spleen against the patient, long-suffering woman who had had the misfortune to incur her dislike.
“A thing like her!” she continued muttering. “A beggarly nurse, with not so much as a box of her own to bring down when she comes into a gentleman’s house, and giving herself airs as if she was a lady. Oh, dear me, and indeed! Couldn’t stoop to talk to a poor girl as if she was a fellow-creature, at the hospital; and down here, lor’ bless us! anyone would think she was a duchess up in the skies instead of a common hospital nurse. Oh, I do ’ate pride, and if it wasn’t that it do have a fall there’d be no living with such people.”
Maria was not very strong yet, and she stopped short—as she expressed it to herself, with her heart in her mouth—and turned red and then pale on hearing a faint rustle behind her, and the nurse’s low sympathetic voice accosting her.
“Ah, Maria, are you better this morning?”
“Oh, yes, thank you, ma’am, much better.”
There was a tremendous emphasis on the “ma’am,” suggestive of keen and subtle sarcasm, and the revolt of honest humility against assumption.