“‘Of g—,’ she says, in her nasty, aggravating, spiteful way.
“‘No imperance;’ I says, ‘a bottle of hot water, wrapped up in a flannel—a-hem—or I shall be having spazzums to that degree as I must have a drop of g— took inward, to save me from sufferin’ as would make any one shudder.’
“Then the cold, and damp, and draughts give me the face-ache so that I had to have a tooth out, and he took the wrong one out, and said I told him that one, when it hadn’t a speck in it, and the other was a regular shell; when what I suffered no one knows but Jane, with my face swelled upon one side like a bladder of lard squeezed, and Jane all the time going on because I would sit up in bed and rock myself to and fro, with a shawl over my shoulders, and the nasty stiff-necked thing grumbling and declaring it was like somebody playing with a pair of bellows in the bed, when it was only the nasty draughty house as she could feel, and me a-dying amost for a drop of g— took inwardly, on a bit of sugar.
“There was hardly a door that would shut, and when they did they stuck to that degree that you couldn’t get ’em open again till you turned cross, when they’d fly open savagely and half knock you down, and I declare to goodness, for a whole month, mum, everything I put in my mouth tasted of paint.
“‘Oh, you beauties!’ I says, when after banging and ringing at the gate for near an hour, I was obliged to go down and let in the workmen as came battering in the middle of the night amost, for it had only just gone six. And there they were, smiths, and bricklayers, and plasterers, a-trampling all over my beautiful clean kitchen till they’d took out the range and scattered the bricks and mortar all over the floor, as trampled about all upstairs and got into the carpets. And the time those men wasted a-poking and pottering about till they’d got in the patent kidginet, when one stuck-up-nosed fellow begins to light it, and show me how it would draw.
“‘You must keep the boiler full,’ he says.
“‘Young man,’ I says, ‘have I been in the best of families for thirty years, and do you think I don’t know as a boiler without any water would bust?’ And then I went out of the kidgin, and would not stop to be insulted by a jumped-up ironmonger’s boy.
“And there the nex day, if the thing didn’t smoke wuss than ever, not a bit going up the chimbley, but regularly blinding you, till master and missus come down, choking and sneezing, and—
“‘Oh, cook,’ says the missus, ‘what have you been doing?’
“‘No, mum,’ I says, ‘it’s not me as has been a-doing anything; it’s your patent kidginer and your noo house, as I’d never have set a foot in if I’d knowed—no, mum, not for double wages and everything found.’