Esther gives an involuntary gasp. It is not a pleasant sensation when the consciousness that one is about to descend from the station that one has been born and has grown up in is first brought stingingly home to one. Happiness, they say, is to be found equally in all ranks, but no one ever yet started the idea that it was sweet to go down. Quick as lightning there flashed before her mind the recollection of a slighting remark made by Miss Blessington, à propos of two very second-rate young ladies, who had come to call at Felton one day during her visit there, that "they looked like little milliners!" Was she going to be a "little milliner?"
"I'm afraid I don't sew well enough," she answers, gently, wondering meanwhile that the idea has never before struck her what a singularly inefficient, incapable member of society she is. "I cannot cut out: I can make a bonnet, and I can mend stockings in a boggling, amateur kind of way, and that is all!"
Recollecting whose stockings it was that she had been used to mend in the boggling way she speaks of, a knife passes through her quivering heart.
"The same objection would apply to your attempting a lady's-maid's place, I suppose?"
"Yes, of course" (bending down her long white neck in a despondent attitude); "but" (with regathered animation in eye and tone)—"but that objection would not apply to any other branch of domestic service—a housemaid, for instance; it cannot require much native genius, or a very long apprenticeship, to know how to empty baths, and make beds, and clean grates: I ought to be able to learn how in a week."
Mrs. Brandon's eyes travel involuntarily to the small, idle, white hands that lie on Esther's lap—the blue-veined, patrician hands that she is so calmly destining to spend their existence in trundling mops and scouring floors.
"My dear child," she says, with compelled compassion in her voice, "you talk very lightly of these things; but you can have no conception, till you make the experiment, of what the trial would be of being thrown on terms of equality among a class of persons so immensely your inferiors in education and refinement."
"I believe it is a well-authenticated fact," answers Esther, firmly, "that in some town in one of the midland counties a baronet's wife is, or was, earning her living by going out charing. What right have I to be more squeamish than she?"
"It is unchristian," pursues Mrs. Brandon—unconvinced by Esther's anecdote, which indeed she treats as apocryphal—"to call anyone common or unclean, and God forbid that I should ever do so! But imagine a lady, born and bred like yourself, exposed to the coarse witticisms of the footman and the intimate friendship of the cook!"
Esther's little face seems to catch some of the deep fire-glow—her breast heaves up and down in angry, quick pants.