“She no more requires a new frock than that table requires one, or that you require the one you are longing for,” stoically persisted Miss Carlyle. “She has got ever so many lying by, and her striped silk, turned, will make up as handsome as ever.”
Wilson backed out of the room and closed the door softly, but her mistress caught a compassionate look directed toward her. Her heart seemed bursting with indignation and despair; there seemed to be no side on which she could turn for refuge. Pitied by her own servants!
She reopened her desk and dashed off a haughty, peremptory note for the attendance of the dressmaker at East Lynne, commanding its immediate dispatch.
Miss Corny groaned in her wrath.
“You will be sorry for not listening to me, ma’am, when your husband shall be brought to poverty. He works like a horse now, and with all his slaving, can scarcely, I fear, keep expenses down.”
Poor Lady Isabel, ever sensitive, began to think they might, with one another, be spending more than Mr. Carlyle’s means would justify; she knew their expenses were heavy. The same tale had been dinned into her ears ever since she married him. She gave up in that moment all thought of the new dress for herself and for Isabel; but her spirit, in her deep unhappiness, felt sick and faint within her.
Wilson, meanwhile, had flown to Joyce’s room, and was exercising her dearly beloved tongue in an exaggerated account of the matter—how Miss Carlyle put upon my lady, and had forbidden a new dress to her, as well as the frock to Miss Isabel.
And yet a few more days passed on.