"And I shouldn't be allowed to say 'let to go,' like ignorant North Enders," retorted Hope, with still more withering emphasis.
Dolly reddened with mortification and anger; then she said haughtily, "I don't happen to know as much as you seem to, how ignorant North Enders talk."
"No; I told you that you were ignorant, and didn't know the difference between people."
"How dare you talk like this to me! You are the most impudent girl I ever saw," cried Dolly, passionately.
"Impudent! How did you dare to speak to me as you did,—to ask me questions? You didn't know me; you never saw me before. You wouldn't have dared to speak to a girl that you thought was like yourself. But you thought you could speak to me. You needn't be polite to a girl who was selling things on the street."
Hope stopped breathless. Her lips were dry; her heart was beating in hard, quick throbs. As for Dolly she was for the moment silenced, for Hope had divined the exact state of her mind. Other things, too, had silenced Dolly for the moment, and these were the evidences of respectability that Hope had enumerated. She was also faced by these evidences in Hope's speech and manner, as those fiery but not vulgar words were poured forth from the dry, tremulous lips; and the effect had been confusing and disturbing to those fixed ideas about working-people that had taken root in her—Dolly's—mind. She was not a bad girl at heart, was this Dolly. She was like a great many people without keen perception or sensibility, and thoughtless from this very lack. The youngest of a prosperous family, she had been petted and pampered until her natural wilfulness and high spirits had made her heedless and over-confident. She had not meant to insult Hope. She had meant simply to satisfy her curiosity; and she thought that it was a perfectly proper thing to satisfy this curiosity about a poor girl who sold flowers on the street, by asking this girl plain questions, such as she had heard her mother ask the poor people who came to get work or to beg. But Hope's plain answers had at first astonished, then angered, then enlightened her.
In the little breathless pause that followed Hope's last words, the two girls regarded each other with a strange mixture of feeling. Hope's feeling was that of relief tinctured with triumph, for she saw that she had made an impression upon "that ignorant girl." Dolly, humiliated but not humble, had a queer struggle with her temper and her sense of justice. She had been made to see that she was partly, if not wholly, in the wrong, and that she had wounded Hope to the quick. In another minute she would have blunderingly made some admission of this,—have said to Hope that she was sorry if she had hurt her feelings, or something to that effect,—if Hope herself had not suddenly remarked in a tone of cold dislike,—
"If you are waiting to ask any more questions, I might as well tell you it's of no use. I sha'n't answer any more; so if you'll please to go away from this corner and stop staring at me, I shall be much obliged to you."
Scarlet with anger, all her better impulses scattered to the winds, Dolly flashed out,—
"You're an ugly, impudent, hateful thing, and I don't care if I have hurt your feelings, so there!"