A tall, plain girl, with straggling curls of a deep red darkened the window: Miss Susan Pike, daughter of Pike, the well-to-do grocer and general dealer. Deep down in Jane Hallet's heart there had always lain an instinctive consciousness, warning her that she was superior to this girl, as well as to Matty Nettleby, of quite a different order altogether: but the young crave companionship, and will have it, suitable or unsuitable, where it is to be had. The only young lady in the place was Ethel Reene, and Jane Hallet's good sense told her that that companionship would be just as unsuitable the other way: she might as well aspire to covet an intimacy with a duchess's daughter as with Miss Reene.
"Weil, you are hard at work this morning, Jane!" was Miss Susan Pike's unceremonious and somewhat resentful salutation, as she put her hands upon the window-sill and, her head inside. For she did not at all favour work herself.
"Will you come in, Susan?" returned Jane, rising and unslipping the bolt of the door: which she had slipped after the departure of her aunt.
"Them are Mrs. Castlemaine's handkerchiefs, I suppose," observed Susan, responding to the invitation and taking a chair. "Grand fine cambric, ain't it! Well, Jane, you do hem-stitch well, I must say."
"I have to work her initials on them also," remarked Jane. "S.C."
"S.C.," repeated Miss Pike. "What do the S. stand for? What's her Chris'en name?"
"Sophia."
"Sophia!--that is a smart name. Do you work the letters in satin stitch?"
"Yes. With the dots on each side it."
"You learnt all that fine hem-stitching and braider-work at the Nunnery, Jane--and your aunt knows how to do it too, I suppose. I shouldn't have patience for it. I'd rather lade out treacle all day: and of all precious disagreeable articles our shop serves, treacle's the worst. I hate it--sticking one's hands, and messing the scales. I broke a basin yesterday morning, lading it out," continued Miss Susan: "let it slip through my fingers. Sister Phoebe came in for a pound of it, to make the ladies a pudding for dinner, she said; and I let her basin drop. Didn't mother rate me!"