"I don't know--I never heard it," said Molly, a little ashamed of her
ignorance.
"Oh! that shows you've never read Miss Edgeworth's tales;--now,
have you? If you had, you'd have recollected that there was such
a word, even if you didn't remember what it was. If you've never
read those stories, they would be just the thing to beguile your
solitude--vastly improving and moral, and yet quite sufficiently
interesting. I'll lend them to you while you're all alone."
"I'm not alone. I'm not at home, but on a visit to Miss Brownings."
"Then I'll bring them to you. I know the Miss Brownings; they used
to come regularly on the school-day to the Towers. Pecksy and Flapsy
I used to call them. I like the Miss Brownings; one gets enough of
respect from them at any rate; and I've always wanted to see the
kind of _ménage_ of such people. I'll bring you a whole pile of Miss
Edgeworth's stories, my dear."
Molly sate quite silent for a minute or two; then she mustered up
courage to speak out what was in her mind.
"Your ladyship" (the title was the firstfruits of the lesson, as
Molly took it, on paying due respect)--"your ladyship keeps speaking
of the sort of--the class of people to which I belong as if it was a
kind of strange animal you were talking about; yet you talk so openly
to me that--"
"Well, go on--I like to hear you."
Still silence.
"You think me in your heart a little impertinent--now, don't you?"
said Lady Harriet, almost kindly.
Molly held her peace for two or three moments; then she lifted her
beautiful, honest eyes to Lady Harriet's face, and said,--
"Yes!--a little. But I think you a great many other things."
"We'll leave the 'other things' for the present. Don't you see,
little one, I talk after my kind, just as you talk after your kind.
It's only on the surface with both of us. Why, I daresay some of your
good Hollingford ladies talk of the poor people in a manner which
they would consider as impertinent in their turn, if they could hear
it. But I ought to be more considerate when I remember how often
my blood has boiled at the modes of speech and behaviour of one of
my aunts, mamma's sister, Lady-- No! I won't name names. Any one
who earns his livelihood by any exercise of head or hands, from
professional people and rich merchants down to labourers, she calls
'persons.' She would never in her most slip-slop talk accord them
even the conventional title of 'gentlemen;' and the way in which
she takes possession of human beings, 'my woman,' 'my people,'--but,
after all, it is only a way of speaking. I ought not to have used
it to you; but somehow I separate you from all these Hollingford
people."