“We mean to persevere in our duty,” corrected Phillis, as she pinned up a sleeve.
“Rather a high moral tone for a dressmaker to take: don’t you think so?” returned Mrs. Cheyne, in the voice Archie hated. The woman certainly had a double nature: there was a twist in her somewhere.
This was too much for Phillis: she fired up in a moment.
“Why should not dressmakers take a high moral tone? You make me feel glad I am one when you talk like that. This is our ambition,—Nan’s and mine, for Dulce is too young to think much about it,—to show by our example that there is no degradation in work. Oh, it is hard! First Mr. Drummond comes, and talks to us as though we were doing wrong; and, then you, to cry down our honest labor, and call it suicide! Is it suicide to work with these hands, that God has made 194 clever, for my mother?” cried Phillis; and her great gray eyes filled up with sudden tears.
Mrs. Cheyne did not look displeased at the girl’s outburst. If she had led up to this point, she could not have received it more calmly.
“There, there! you need not excite yourself, child!” she said, more gently. “I only wanted to know what you would say. So Miss Mewlstone has been to you, I hear?—and Miss Middleton, too? but that’s her benevolence. Of course Miss Mattie comes out of curiosity. How I do detest a fussy woman, with a tongue that chatters faster than a purling brook! What do you say? No harm in her?” for Phillis had muttered something to this effect. “Oh, that is negative praise! I like people to have a little harm in them: it is so much more amusing.”
“I cannot say I am of your opinion,” returned Phillis, coldly: she was rather ashamed of her fit of enthusiasm, and cross in consequence.
“My dear, I always thought Lucifer must have been rather an interesting person.” Then, as Phillis looked scandalized, and drew herself up, she said, in a funny voice, “Now, don’t tell your mother what I said, or she will think me an improper character; and I want to be introduced to her.”
“You want to be introduced to my mother!” Phillis could hardly believe her ears. Certainly Mrs. Cheyne was a most inexplicable person.
“Dressmakers don’t often have mothers, do they?” returned Mrs. Cheyne, with a laugh; “at least, they are never on view. I suppose they are in the back premises doing something?”