"Of course. What a question! Do exactly as you like with your own servants."
She finds Sarah in her room busily unpacking.
"Oh! there you are," cries Eleanor. "I forgot I had given you my keys. It is such a blessing to be able to talk in English, that foreign stuff was awful, I could not speak a word! Yes, I will wear my lovely pink tea-gown—did you ever see anything so pretty, Sarah? I must make you put it on some day, just to see how it looks on another person. You are a bit stouter than I am though, but perhaps you could pull in——"
And so Eleanor rattles on, just as if Sarah were one of the farm-servants at home, and she the same unaffected light-hearted Miss Grebby.
"Do you come from the country, Sarah?" she asks at last.
"Yes, ma'am. My father's a grocer, and mother keeps house for the doctor's children in our next village."
"Then they don't live together?"
"No, ma'am, it's father's temper. We none of us can't live at home, he is that hasty! It ain't safe, ma'am, it ain't really!"
"How dreadful," sighs Eleanor. "Doesn't it frighten you?"
"Lor! yes, ma'am. I have seen him grow purple round the eyes, and crimson in the cheeks, and throve a whole sack of flour through the window."