“Well, sir, it’s got ’em lots o’ votes, but it do seem to me a pack o’ folly. No offence.”
“And the Primrose Dames, Mrs. Brown?”
“Well, sir, they’re a pretty spry lot o’ ladies, and they come and talk, talk, talk, and me at the mangle, and I wish ’em anywheres; and one o’ ’em promised to have my kitchen boiler looked to, but, Lord! that’s three months ago come Monday was a week, and nobody’s come to the boiler.”
“The Conservative party always forgets the boilers; and are extremely astonished when the neglected boilers blow up.”
“My boiler was no business o’ theirs,” says the good woman, hotly; “but if they said they’d send, they hought to hev sent. But there! that’s them ladies all over, in and out, and to and fro, and it’s how’s my soul? and how’s my dust-bin? and hev I faith? and hev I a patent kitchener? and do I read my Bible? and do I keep the traps on my drains? and do I see the blessin’s o’ eddication? and do I keep my sink flushed? and am I an abstainer? and do I use carbolic acid? Such a pack o’ nonsense, and in they comes without rappin’; and if they sees a bit o’ dust in a corner ’tis ‘Lord, Mrs. Brown, don’t ye know as dust is microbes, and microbes is sartain death?’ And I says, says I, ‘No, marm, my leddy, my granny lived to ninety-six, and on her ninetieth birthday she walked four miles to market at Winchester and back, and she allus said to all o’ us as dust was wholesome, and cobwebs too, and shouldn’t ne’er be interfered with——’”
She stops, out of breath, and the listening policeman smiles again.
“People were more robust in those days, Mrs. Brown,” remarked Bertram.
“Yes, sir, there weren’t so many doctors all over the place. When I was a gal, in our village there weren’t a doctor within twenty mile; and nobody never was ill. Nowadays young and old is allus talking about their livers and lights till they fret theirselves into sickness.”
“That is very possible. Science is much to blame for teaching humanity to concentrate the mind on the body. There I wholly agree with you.”
Mrs. Brown picks up her load of linen, which she has momentarily rested on the back of the bench.