“I forgot,” he muttered sullenly. “I thought I had.”
She smiled the smile of approaching triumph.
“No, you did not,” she said. “You knew you'd told a lie. It was in your face. All of a piece—all of a piece.”
The way she said this, like a pirate counting over his captured treasure, was enraging. Jeremy could feel the wild fury at himself, at her, at the stupid blunder of the whole business rising to his throat.
“If you think I'm going to let this pass you're making a mighty mistake,” she continued, “which I wouldn't do not if you paid me all the gold in the kingdom. I mayn't be good enough to keep my place and look after such as you, but anyways I'm able to stop your lying for another week or two. I know my duty even though there's them as thinks I don't.”
She positively snorted, and the excitement of her own vindication and the just condemnation of Jeremy was such that her hands trembled.
“I don't care what you do,” Jeremy shouted. “You can tell anyone you like. I don't care what you do. You're a beastly woman.”
She turned upon him, her face purple. “That's enough, Master Jeremy,” she said, her voice low and trembling. “I'm not here to be called names by such as you. You'll be sorry for this before you're much older.... You see.”
There was then an awful and sickly pause. Jeremy seemed to himself to be sinking lower and lower into a damp clammy depth of degradation. What must this world be that it could change itself so instantly from a place of gay and happy pleasure into a dim groping room of punishment and dismay?
His feelings were utterly confused. He supposed that he was terribly wicked. But he did not feel wicked. He only felt miserable, sick and defiant. Mary and Helen came in, their eyes open to a crisis, their bodies tuned sympathetically to the atmosphere of sin and crime that they discerned around them.