“Tut, tut!” answered Adeline, looking away. “Your dress is a shocking bad fit. I’ll alter it for you. I had no idea you came here courting, Juffrouw Boster—and in such a dress as that!”
Hephzibah longed to strike the woman, but she only stupidly repeated, “What did you come for?” amid the laughter and cries of the others close by. Then suddenly she stamped her foot.
“Go away, or I’ll make you.”
“You!” retorted Adeline, fairly roused. “What next, you Poster? Know that you are speaking to your betters. Imagine the insolence of it! I and Klomp! I! The insolence of it! Klomp and you; yes, that is another matter. Here, Baby! Baby!” A sudden resolve seemed to seize upon her. Her little boy of some three or four raw summers came unwillingly towards the house, diverted from his course by continual grabs at the porker’s wispy tail. “Do you see this child?” asked Adeline, catching hold of a faded blue mantle, and turning up a pretty though mealy little face. “This is my child, my only one.” She had shrewdly left the infant at Drum.
Hephzibah started, and vainly pretended to have slipped. “Well?” she said.
“His name is Gerard.”
Slowly the faithful servant lifted her crossed eyes to the other’s better-favored face. “Hussy!” she said, deliberately, with all an honest woman’s slow pressure on the term.
Adeline burned with the immediate umbrage of a girl who feels her ears boxed. At a leap she resolved to rejoice in the rôle which had long allured her.
“Menial,” she said, loftily, “know your place. You are speaking to Mevrouw van Helmont.”