“You mistake,” said Grace; “it is quite good enough for me, but I do not think it is anything like good enough for Mrs. Brady.” And she took her place at table whilst Susan flounced out of the room only to turn back and inquire whether she would “be plazed to drink water or milk.”
Had she followed Mrs. Hartley’s instructions Grace would have said water. As it was, the national partiality for milk common to the Irish ladies at that period, and which perhaps with the moist climate had share in their lovely complexions, extinguished all English lights, and so she chose the latter, thereby mollifying Susan, who thought “she might not be so stuck-up after all, maybe.”
Of potatoes and milk Grace made her meal with relish, it must be confessed, and spite of her sorrow. The potatoes were capital, the milk rich. The herrings she could not fancy, the lake of slowly congealing fat in which they reposed effectually warned her from them. While she ate she thought, “Let Susan be what she would, or perhaps would not, she, Miss Moffat, could not put that wrong right if she kept her at arms’ length for ever. On the whole, had she not better try to conciliate this woman, who, spite of her position, seemed friendly to Nettie? Perhaps,” thought Grace, “because she knows if this door closes behind her, none other would open to receive her.”
There were not many women who dared even think of adopting a conciliatory policy under such circumstances; but in many ways Grace’s position was exceptional.
After all, what is the good of virtue if it be not sufficiently certain of its own standing to walk just once and away on the same side of the road with vice, and refrain from drawing its skirts decorously around it?
Grace’s virtue, at all events, was made of sufficiently strong stuff to risk all the results of such a companionship. She hated the sin she felt had been done, as probably those to whom the nature of sin is almost a mystery alone are able—with an abhorrence, a detestation, a contempt, a loathing, akin to the feelings with which a man who had bathed from his earliest youth might look upon a disease produced by filth, and the lack of all ordinary physical cleanliness; but—black tangled hair, unkempt, unbraided, bold eyes, insolence, brazen defiance notwithstanding—she was sorry for the sinner.
Where vice flaunts past dressed in the latest fashion, driving a lovely pair of ponies, assuming the most recent fashionable manner whether that manner be modest or forward, we may call it picturesque, and forget, if we choose, the ghastly death’s head lurking beneath the rouge and paint and powder plastered on the face of Sin’s last successful child; but when we come to see some of Sin’s despised daughters, some of those who have been cut off by their unjust parent with less even than the traditional shilling, I think the observer must be less than man or woman—more fiend than either can prove on occasion—who shall fail to consider for what inconceivably small wages the devil gets immortal souls to work his ends.
If his employés would strike, what an involuntary lock-out from Hell here and Hell hereafter the world should witness!
“Susan,” began Miss Moffat, as the handmaiden having piled plate and vegetable dish on the top of the herrings, was about to remove the dinner appointments on the extemporised tray,—“do not you think Mrs. Brady ought to see a doctor?”
“I think it’s time she saw somebody,” agreed Susan.