“Perhaps they spare at the spigot and pour out at the bung-hole, my lady,” said Mrs. Massarene in homely metaphor. “There’s a-many has that fault, I have it myself. It’s all I can do still to hold myself from saving the candle-ends.”
“Good heavens! Do you really mean it?”
“I do, indeed, ma’am,” said the mistress of Harrenden House. “When I see them beautiful wax-lights, just burned an inch or two, and going to be taken away by them wasteful servants——”
Her companion laughed, infinitely diverted.
“But it’s all electric light here!”
“Not in the bedrooms. I wouldn’t have the uncanny thing in the bedrooms. You see, my lady,” she added timidly in confidential whispers, “William should have led me up to all this grandeur gradual. But he didn’t. He always said, ‘We’ll scrape on this side and dash on the other.’ So till we come over to be gentlefolks, I had to cook and sweep, and pinch and spare, and toil and moil, and I can’t get out of the habit. On the child he always spent; but on naught else not a cent till we came to Europe.”
“Ah, by the way, this daughter,” said Mouse, suddenly roused to the perception that there was an unknown factor in the lives of these humble people. “Where is she? I have never seen her. She is out, I think?”
Over the pallid, puffy, sorrowful face of the poor harassed aspirant to smart society there came a momentary brightness.
“Yes, ma’am; she’s what you call ‘out’; I presented her myself,” said Mrs. Massarene with pride.
“But where is she now?”