Esther spoke in her quiet, stolid way, finding her words unconsciously.
"You don't know what you're saying, nurse; you can't…. You've forgotten yourself. Next time I engage a nurse I'll try to get one who has lost her baby, and then there'll be no bother."
"It is a life for a life—more than that, ma'am—two lives for a life; and now the life of my boy is asked for."
A strange look passed over Mrs. Rivers' face. She knew, of course, that she stood well within the law, that she was doing no more than a hundred other fashionable women were doing at the same moment; but this plain girl had a plain way of putting things, and she did not care for it to be publicly known that the life of her child had been bought with the lives of two poor children. But her temper was getting the better of her.
"He'll only be a drag on you. You'll never be able to bring him up, poor little bastard child."
"It is wicked of you to speak like that, ma'am, though it is I who am saying it. It is none of the child's fault if he hasn't got a father, nor is it right that he should be deserted for that… and it is not for you to tell me to do such a thing. If you had made sacrifice of yourself in the beginning and nursed your own child such thoughts would not have come to you. But when you hire a poor girl such as me to give the milk that belongs to another to your child, you think nothing of the poor deserted one. He is but a bastard, you say, and had better be dead and done with. I see it all now; I have been thinking it out. It is all so hidden up that the meaning is not clear at first, but what it comes to is this, that fine folks like you pays the money, and Mrs. Spires and her like gets rid of the poor little things. Change the milk a few times, a little neglect, and the poor servant girl is spared the trouble of bringing up her baby and can make a handsome child of the rich woman's little starveling."
At that moment the baby began to cry; both women looked in the direction of the cradle.
"Nurse, you have utterly forgotten yourself, you have talked a great deal of nonsense, you have said a great deal that is untrue. You accused me of wishing your baby were dead, indeed I hardly know what wild remarks you did not indulge in. Of course, I cannot put up with such conduct—to-morrow you will come to me and apologise. In the meantime the baby wants you, are you not going to her?"
"I'm going to my own child."
"That means that you refuse to nurse my baby?"