“My dear Maria, she is a neighbor. And you never know how these queer people from London may turn out. Sometimes they prove desirable. I hesitated a long time, though, when I heard her husband was a journalist: very often journalist means swindler.”
“She looks to me like a woman who drinks,” Maria Furlonger said. “Drink makes people talk at random; drink makes people forget their duty to their superiors in the parish.”
“Dear mother always said that a drunken woman was such a much more painful sight than a drunken man,” Annie Jayne said. “Oh! I can’t believe it of her, Maria. She was quite nice to Baby the other day.”
Annie had her first baby, and thought of very little else besides. If anyone admired Baby she concluded, in her simple, ardently maternal way, that such admiration was a moral certificate.
“Drink! Nonsense!” said Mrs. Turle, quite sharply for her. “I must say she has very clever ideas. She told me the other day that she was thinking of patenting an automatic arrangement for making cyclists swallow their own dust—though it would never do for you, Nancy, with your chest. Why, here is Jethro. I suppose he has come to take you away, Pamela?”
[CHAPTER VI.]
THE autumn rains set in early that year. Every night when Pamela fell asleep in her bedstead with the fluted posts and hangings of chintz, having a fearful pattern of black roses, she heard the murmuring rush of rain down the pipes and into the soft-water tubs. Every morning she was awakened by the swish of rain against the casement and the clatter of the maidservant’s clogs on the stones in the yard.
She spent long afternoons in the drawing-room staring dismally out at the sodden fields and the hills beyond, which shed sad mist. She was left very much to her own resources; her new relations rarely visited in bad weather.
She gave the house the benefit of her active brain, instituting all sorts of changes which she honestly believed to be reforms. She flung a modern, flimsy feeling of culture about the staid old place—a feeling expressed by current magazines, superficial opinions, shallow daring.