Mr. Ruan emerged from behind his paper.
“She’ll ’ave to make a five-pun note do, then. ’Ard times, nowadays,” he mumbled, with his mouth full of buttered toast.
“Oh! but the Mansfields are quite poor people, I know,” said Bridget. “They live very quietly. I sha’n’t want a lot of grand frocks.”
Her mother’s face clouded. She pushed Bridget’s cup of tea irritably towards her.
“I never in my life met such a girl as you!” she said. “You go to an expensive school enough, Heaven knows, and the only friends you make are a miserable, poverty-stricken crew that are no good to you. You’ll never get a ’usband as long as you live, and serves you right. You’ve got no more gumption than a baby. I’m sick and tired of it all.”
Bridget’s face flushed.
“A husband!” she echoed scornfully. “Do you think that I’m always thinking and scheming for that, like that awful Wilby girl? It’s disgusting, I consider.”
“That awful Wilby girl ’ud get married five times over, before you!” retorted her mother, angrily. “She knows how to make herself agreeable, an’ that’s what the men like.”
“I don’t care twopence what ‘the men’ like,” Bridget broke out fiercely. “I don’t like ‘the men,’ and that’s what matters to me. Did I come into the world to consider the taste of Mr. Jenkins or Mr. Wilby, do you think?”
“You came into the world to make me wretched, that’s all I know,” replied Mrs. Ruan, scraping her chair back from the table, and rising as she spoke.