“Oh yes,” I replied, “we keep Hannah; but Hannah has a bad cold and is rather cross. You would like some tea, wouldn’t you, Miss Donnithorne?”
“I should prefer a cup of tea at this moment to almost anything in the world,” said Miss Donnithorne. “It’s this awful fog, you know; it gets into one’s throat.” Here she coughed; then she loosened her furs; then she thought better of it and clasped them more tightly round her person; then she drew her chair close to the fire, right on the rug, which father rather objected to, and put her feet, which were in goloshes, on the fender. She held out her hands to the blaze, and said, “It strikes me you haven’t much of a servant or much of a fire either. Oh, goodness me! I have my goloshes on and they’ll melt. Take them off for me, child, and be quick about it.”
I obeyed. I had begun by being rather afraid of Miss Donnithorne, but by the time I had got off her goloshes—and they seemed to stick very firmly to her boots—I was laughing; and when I laughed she laughed in unison, and then we were quite on equal terms and got on quite delightfully.
“What about tea?” she said. “My throat is as raspy as though it were a file.”
“I’ll see about it,” I said, speaking somewhat dubiously.
“Why, where’s the difficulty?”
“It’s Hannah.”
“Does she grudge you your tea?”
“No, I don’t think so; but, you see, we don’t have tea quite so early, and when your house is so big, and there are a great many stairs, and you have only one servant, and she is rather old—although father doesn’t think her so—and has got a bad cold in her head, and is wearing her grandmother’s plaid shawl, you have to think twice before you ask her to do anything extra.”
“It is a long catalogue of woes,” responded Miss Grace. “But I tell you what it is—oh, they call you Dumps, don’t they?”