Miss Day sniffed audibly. "So I should think. To cobble like that!"
They were Mother's dams, hastily made, late at night, and with all Mother's genial impatience at useful sewing as opposed to beautiful. Laura's intention had been to shield Mother from criticism, as well as to spare Miss Day's feelings. But to have done it so clumsily as this! To have had to wince under Miss Day's scepticism! It was only a wonder the governess had not there and then taxed her with the fib. For who believed in old nurses nowadays? They were a stock property, borrowed on the spur of the moment from readings in THE FAMILY HERALD, from Tennyson's LADY CLARE. Why on earth had such a far-fetched excuse leapt to her tongue? Why could she not have said Sarah, the servant, the maid-of-all-work? Then Miss Day would have had no chance to sniff, and she, Laura, could have believed herself believed, instead of having to fret over her own stupidity.—But what she would like more than anything to know was, why the mending of the stockings at home should NOT be Sarah's work? Why must it just be Mother—her mother alone—who made herself so disagreeably conspicuous, and not merely by darning the stockings, but, what was a still greater grievance, by not even darning them well?
XI.
It was an odd thing, all the same, how easy it was to be friends with Lilith Gordon: though she did not belong to Laura's set though Laura did not even like her, and though she had had ample proof that Lilith was double-faced, not to be trusted. Yet, in the months that followed the affair of the purple dress, Laura grew more intimate with the plump, sandy-haired girl than with either Bertha, or Inez, or Tilly. Or, to put it more exactly, she was continually having lapses into intimacy, and repenting them when it was too late. In one way Lilith was responsible for this: she could make herself very pleasant when she chose, seem to be your friend through thick and thin, thus luring you on to unbosom yourself; and afterwards she would go away and laugh over what you had told her, with other girls. And Laura was peculiarly helpless under such circumstances: if it was done with tact, and with a certain assumed warmth of manner, anyone could make a cat's-paw of her.
That Lilith and she undressed for bed together had also something to do with their intimacy: this half-hour when one's hair was unbound and replaited, and fat and thin arms wielded the brush, was the time of all others for confidences. The governess who occupied the fourth bed did not come upstairs till ten o'clock; the publican's daughter, a lazy girl, was usually half asleep before the other two had their clothes off.
It was in the course of one of these confidential chats that Laura did a very foolish thing. In a moment of weakness, she gratuitously gave away the secret that Mother supported her family by the work of her hands.
The two girls were sitting on the side of Lilith's bed. Laura had a day of mishaps behind her—that partly, no doubt, accounted for her self-indulgence. But, in addition, her companion had just told her, unasked, that she thought her "very pretty". It was not in Laura's nature to let this pass: she was never at ease under an obligation; she had to pay the coin back in kind.
"Embroidery? What sort? However does she do it?"—Lilith's interest was on tiptoe at once—a false and slimy interest, the victim afterwards told herself.
"Oh, my mother's awfully clever. It's just lovely, too, what she does—all in silk—and ever so many different colours. She made a piano-cover once, and got fifty pounds for it."