"You don't get your cleaning over, any more than she does," remarked Miss Betsy boldly.
Mrs. Carter turned an angry gaze upon her; a torrent of words breaking from her lips. "I get my cleaning over! I, who am at work every moment of my day, from early morning till late at night! You'd liken me to that good-for-nothing Het Mason, who hardly makes a dozen o' gloves in a week, and keeps her house like a pigsty! Where would you and your father be, if I didn't work to keep you, and slave to make the place sweet and comfortable? Be off to Dame Buffle's and buy me a besom, you ungrateful monkey: and then you turn to and dust these chairs."
Betsy did not wait for a second bidding. She preferred going for besoms, or for anything else, to her mother's kitchen and her mother's scolding. Her coming back was another affair; she would be just as likely to propel the besom into the kitchen and make off herself, as to enter.
She suddenly stopped now, door in hand, to relate some news.
"I say, mother, there's going to be a party at the Alhambra tea-gardens."
"A party at the Alhambra tea-gardens, with frost and snow on the ground!" ironically repeated Mrs. Carter. "Be off, and don't be an oaf."
"It's true," said Betsy. "All Honey Fair's going to it. I shall go too. 'Melia and Mary Ann Cross is going to have new things for it, and——"
"Will you go along and get that besom?" cried angry Mrs. Carter. "No child of mine shall go off to their Alhambras, catching their death on the wet grass."
"Wet grass!" echoed Betsy. "Why, you're never such a gaby as to think they'd have a party on the grass! It is to be in the big room, and there's to be a fiddle and a tam——"
"——bourine" never came. Mrs. Carter sent the wet mop flying after Miss Betsy, and the young lady, dexterously evading it, flung-to the door and departed.