Victoria felt vaguely annoyed. The woman's words were anonymous.
'But what do you think, Mary,' she asked.
'Oh, I think you're quite right, mum,' said Mary.
Victoria watched her face in the glass. Not a wave of opinion rippled over it.
Victoria got up. She stretched out her arms for Mary to slip the skirt over her head. The maid closed the lace blouse, quickly clipped the fasteners together, then closed the placket hole completely. Without a word she fetched the light grey coat, slipped it on Victoria's shoulders. She found the grey skin bag, while Victoria put on her white fox toque. She then encased Victoria's head in a grey silk veil and sprayed her with scent. Victoria looked at herself in the glass. She was very lovely, she thought.
'Anything else, mum,' said Mary's quiet voice.
'No, Mary, nothing else.'
'Thank you, mum.'
As Victoria turned, she found the maid had disappeared, but her watchful presence was by the front door to open it for her. Victoria saw her from the stairs, a short erect figure, with a pale face framed in dark hair. She stood with one hand on the latch, the other holding a cab whistle; her eyes were fixed upon the ground. As Victoria passed out she looked at Mary. The girl's eyes were averted still, her face without a question. Upon her left hand she wore a thin gold ring with a single red stone. The ring fastened on Victoria's imagination as she stepped into a hansom which was loafing near the door. It was not the custom, she knew, for a maid to wear a ring; and this alone was enough to amaze her. Was it possible that Mary's armour was not perfect in every point of servility? No doubt she had just put it on as it was her evening out and she would be leaving the house in another half hour. And then? Would another and a stronger hand take hers, hold it, twine its fingers among her fingers. Victoria wondered, for the vision of love and Mary were incongruous ideas. It was almost inconceivable that with her cap and apron she doffed the mantle of her reserve; she surely could not vibrate; her heart could not beat in unison with another. Yet, there was the ring, the promise of passion. Victoria nursed for a moment the vision of the two spectral figures, walking in a dusky park, arms round waists, then of shapes blended on a seat, faces hidden, lip to lip.
Victoria threw herself back in the cab. What did it all matter after all? Mary was the beast of burden which she had captured by piracy. She had been her equal once when abiding by the law; she had shared her toil and her slender meed of thanks. Now she was a buccaneer, outside the social code, and as such earned the right to command. So much did Victoria dominate that she thought she would refrain from the exercise of a bourgeois prerogative: the girl should wear her ring, even though custom forbade it, load herself with trinkets if she chose, for as a worker and a respecter of social laws surely she might well be treated as the sacrificial ox.