“Can’t you see for yourself there bain’t?” was the response. “You’d best begin—they don’t give us so very long.”
“But why bain’t there no plates?” persisted Maria.
“What does it matter about plates?” grumbled the other. “I’d be willin’ enough to do wi’out plates—’tis the food as I mind. You’ve got butter—all the old folks have that, but they chuck us younger ones a bit o’ cheese as hard as a paving stone.”
Maria looked at her lump of bread with its triangular portion of butter set forth on the bare board, and wept. This was what she had come to, she, Maria Stickly, who had always throughout her long, honest, struggling life held up her head with the best! She bowed it now on her poor sunken chest, and sobbed aloud.
A long skinny hand presently hovered over her discarded portion, and her elder neighbour said, with a titter and a cunning look:—
“If ’ee don’t want it, ye’ll p’r’aps have no objection to my taking of it.”
And on its owner making no sign the transfer speedily took place.
“Nay now, that bain’t fair!” whispered the woman on the other side, angrily; “I claim half. Her and me was a-speaking together first.”
They began to quarrel over the food, while Maria sobbed on between them; the sight of their inflamed faces and the sound of their angry, coarse words seemed to her to aggravate the indignity.
“The food be thrown down to us like dogs,” she said to herself, “an’ they be a-fightin’ over it like dogs!”