"I was sayin' to Stitchley only yesterday mornin' at breakfast—he was 'avin' sausages, 'e bein' so fond of 'em—'Mrs. Bindle 'as taste,' I says, 'and refinement.'"
Mrs. Bindle, who had seated herself opposite her visitor, drew in her chin and folded her hands before her, with the air of one who is receiving only what she knows to be her due.
There was a slight pause.
"Yes," said Mrs. Stitchley, with a sigh, "I was always one for refinement and respectability."
Mrs. Bindle said nothing. She was wondering why Mrs. Stitchley had called. Although she would not have put it into words, or even allow it to find form in her thoughts, she knew Mrs. Stitchley to be a woman to whom gossip was the breath of life.
"Now you're wonderin' why I've come, my dear," continued Mrs. Stitchley, who always grew more friendly as her calls lengthened, "but it's a dooty. I says to Stitchley this mornin', 'There's that poor, dear Mrs. Bindle a-livin' in innocence of the way in which she's bein' vilated.'" Mrs. Stitchley was sometimes a little loose in the way she constructed her sentences and the words she selected.
Mrs. Bindle's lips began to assume a hard line.
"I don't understand, Mrs. Stitchley," she said.
"Jest wot I says to Stitchley, 'She don't know, the poor lamb,' I says, ''ow she's bein' deceived, 'ow she's——'" Mrs. Stitchley paused, not from any sense of the dramatic; but because of a violent hiccough that had assailed her.
"Excuse me, mum—Mrs. Bindle," she corrected herself; "but I always was a one for 'iccups, an' when it ain't 'iccups it's spasms. Stitchley was sayin' to me only yesterday, no it wasn't, it was the day before, that——"