“Oh, your Grace, don’t let yourself blame your mamma,” said the good nursemaid. “But for sure it is hard to be shut up here on a bright breezy day. But eat your peaches, dear, ’twill all be the same to-morrow.”
“But you’re shut up too, Harriet,” said Jack, regarding her thoughtfully.
“Law, yes, sir, I never hardly gets an hour out.”
“But you’d like to go out?”
“Yes, sir; but them as it above me, you see, don’t think of that.”
Jack ceased munching his peach and looked at her gravely. “I think that’s very wrong. When I’m a man, Harriet, everybody shall have hours out.”
“You dear little soul,” thought Harriet, “you think so now, but when you’re a man I dessay you’ll be like all the others, and think only of yourself.”
“No, Harriet,” said Jack, solemnly divining her thoughts, “no, I sha’n’t forget.”
The solace of having hurt Jack only momentarily diverted his mother from her torturing thoughts for a brief space of time. Her mind returned in fretting and feverish anxiety to the mission on which William Massarene had gone.
Two or three intimate friends were coming to dine with her at eight o’clock. She wrote a few hasty words and put them off on the score of her headache; they were intimate friends, and what is intimacy worth if it does not enable us to sacrifice our intimates to ourselves? The notes sent, she went to sleep and slept fitfully for some hours. She really felt ill, for she was so unused to severe mental disturbance that it affected her physical health. She would have liked to send for her physician, but she was afraid he would perceive that she had something on her mind. She saw in the mirror that she did not look like herself.