The woman seemed to feel a bitter pleasure in disparaging herself.
She went on: 'The child is young, and she will be unhappy at the outset, and be longing to be back with her mother, as she styles that person who brought her up. But in time she will grow out of that and make new friends, and will learn new ways, and then—then there will be a great gulf fixed between her and that common woman who was her nurse, a gulf so wide and so profound that there will be no passing from the one to the other. I must make up my mind to that. I see that it will come. But I will endure it for Winefred's sake.'
Drops stood on Jane Marley's brow, and there was a fire in her eye, but no signs of unbending.
'I will do my best for her,' said Mrs. Jose. 'I will myself take Winefred to Bath—and to say the truth, I should like to see my high relations again, and have an excuse for a visit. Milk always gains a flavour from what it is set nigh. That is why you can't well have meat in a dairy. I shall come back with quite a smack of gentility.'
Mrs. Jose mused.
'We must go to Lyme,' she said after a while. 'I will take her there with her trunk, thence we shall get to Dorchester, and so on by coach. It can be done.'
'When?'
'Next week.'
All at once Jane's eyes were as windows against which rain has beaten, and the woman broke down utterly. It was like the collapse of an oak.
The distress, the despair of the mother were so great, so overwhelming, that the kind-hearted farmer's wife could only stand and look on, unable to offer consolation, powerless to stem the rush of passionate sorrow. She allowed her to give way without an attempt to check her, and tarried patiently till the first burst was overpast.