“Lizzie’s ways are so noisy.”
“Her ways are noisy and rampagious,” assented Mrs. Dyke, “more particularly when she has been at her drops; and noise puts out a sick man.”
“Her drops!” I repeated, involuntarily, the word calling up a latent doubt that lay in my mind.
“When girls that have been in busy employment all day and every day, suddenly settle down to idleness, they sometimes slip into this habit or that habit, not altogether good for themselves, which they might never else have had time to think of,” remarked Mrs. Dyke. “I’ve come in here more than once lately and seen Lizzie drinking hot spirits-and-water in the daytime: I know you must have seen the same, sir, or I’d not mention it—and beer she’ll take unlimited.”
Of course I had seen it.
“I think she must have learnt it at the counter; drinking never was in our family, and I never knew that it was in her father’s,” continued Mrs. Dyke. “But some of the young women, serving at these bars, get to like the drink through having the sight and smell of it about ’em all day long.”
That was more than likely, but I did not say so, not caring to continue that branch of the subject.
“The marriage was a misfortune, Mrs. Dyke.”
“For him I suppose you gentlemen consider it was,” she answered. “It will be one for her if he should die: she’d have to go back to work again and she has got out o’ the trick of it. Ah! she thought grand things of it at first, naturally, marrying a gentleman! But unequal marriages rarely turn out well in the long run. I knew nothing of it till it was done and over, or I should have advised her against it; my husband’s place lay in a different part of London then—Eaton Square way. Better, perhaps, for Lizzie had she gone out to service in the country, like her sister.”
“Did she always live in London?”