“A most notorious woman. I’m on the local Board of Guardians and all sorts of funny old committees for looking after everything and everybody.”
“What do you do?”
Clare asked the question as though some deep mystery lay in the answer.
“Oh, I poke up the old stick-in-the-muds,” said Madge Vernon, “and stir up no end of jolly rows. I make them do things, too; and they hate it. Oh, how they hate it!”
“What things, Madge?”
“Why, attending to drains, and starving widows, and dead dogs, and imbecile children, and people ‘what won’t work,’ and people ‘what will’ but can’t.”
Clare laughed at this description and then became sad again.
“I envy you! I have nothing on earth to do, and my days are growing longer and longer, so that each one seems a year.”
“Haven’t you any housework to do?” asked Madge.
“Not since my husband could afford an extra servant.”