Florence laughed.
“True?” she echoed. “Not one word of it! I believe she found out that you weren’t the mistress for her before she told you about ‘the public.’ She reckoned that would choke you off. They are cute enough for anything. True! Why, she openly told you one flaring fib, and you never noticed it!”
“What was it?” asked the bewildered Lucy.
“She said she went into service at fifteen and is twenty-two; and next she said she had been in service ten years. And yet you’re ready to cry over her! Oh, my dear, simple sister! You need not be so sorry for her—be sorry for yourself, in the power of such as she. She needs no pity!”
“This only shows her greater need of pity,” said Lucy; but she had to stoop and soothe Hugh, who was plucking at her dress and saying—
“Let us come away, mamma! I don’t like these people, and the room is so nasty!”
“Poor little dear, he isn’t used to it!” said a voice which Lucy had not heard before.
It was that of a lady seated on a chair half behind the little sofa, which was drawn forward crosswise. This lady was knitting a child’s stocking. She was quietly and neatly dressed, and did not look much more than thirty years of age. She had a pale face, with a sort of enduring stillness upon it, not unlike that of one bearing up against some chronic pain or trouble. She patted Hugh’s shoulder kindly and smiled up into Lucy’s face, adding—
“It’s a great pity any of us have to get used to it!”
“Yes, indeed,” Lucy responded, instantly recognising that she was addressed by another “expectant mistress.” “We have been here more than an hour already, and nobody has even approached me but two most unsuitable women! It is a terrible waste of time!” she added, thinking of the brief wintry daylight in which she had to finish her seaside sketches, which the picture-dealer desired to have in hand before the New Year, and which she herself wished to complete before she took up her teaching at the Institute.