“Ow, ’e ain’t pyd fer ’em!” returned Belinda Ann reassuringly, “a friend o’ ’is goes on in the crowd, an’ ken pass in two friends when ’e likes. Thet’s ’ow it is.”
The next time I attended the sewing-class I asked her how she liked it, and nearly had my nose snapped off in return. For some reason (I shrewdly suspected that Joe and she had had a “tiff”) she was in a grievously bad temper, and had already quarrelled with everyone in the room except me. Now it was my turn, and as she turned on me with a gloomy frown I felt sorry I had spoken.
“Like it?” she remarked, viciously biting off her cotton with her strong white teeth. “I never seed anythink more morotonous in all my born days! Call thet a ply? I calls it a reglar ’owlin’ swindle!”
“Why? What was the matter with it?” I inquired mildly. “What was it called?”
“Fust!” she retorted ferociously, and for a minute I wondered what she meant, till it dawned on me that she probably meant Faust.
“Well, what happened?” I coaxed. “You might just tell me, Belinda.”
“Ow, I dun know,” she answered sulkily. “There was a sort of a cellar plyce, kinder prison, with a old cove a-reading in a book, an’ then ’e began ter jaw, and ’e could do it too. I thought ’e’d never leave off, an’ I’d jest said ter my Joe, ‘What’s thet there old cove a-doing of?’ when there comes fireworks, an’ someone in red ’ops out of ’em, an’ if ’e don’t bergin ter jaw! My word, it was sick’nin’!” and she relapsed into gloomy silence.
“But, Belinda,” I put in, “they are obliged to talk to let you know what the story is about. If they did it all without speaking, you might not understand it.”
“An’ small loss,” she retorted uncompromisingly. “I didn’t understand it as it was. In one part three or four people went into a church, an’ I says, sarcastick-like, ‘It must be a weddin’, sech lots o’ people agoin’ to church,’ but Joe says it was meant there was a service agoin’ on, an’ all I ken say is it was a werry poor congregeration.”