Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/59

Rh creature badgered by sanitary officers and board of guardians, and magistrates, and by my lord, the chairman at the petty sessions?"

Arminell looked wonderingly at her, surprised at her strange address.

"Because the world is governed by injustice. What had you done as a babe, that you should have the gold spoon put into your mouth, and why had I the pewter one? It is not only sanitary officers and guardians of the poor against me, bullying me, a poor lone widow. Heaven above has been dead set against me from the moment I was born. I've seen the miners truck out ore and cable; now a truck-load of metal, then one of refuse; one to be refined, the other to be rejected. It is so in life; we are run out of the dark mines of nothingness into light, and some of us are all preciousness and some all dross. But do you know this, Miss Arminell, they turned out heaps on heaps of refuse from the copper mines, and now they have abandoned the copper to work the refuse heaps? They find them rich—in what do you suppose? In arsenic."

"You have had much trouble in your life?" asked Arminell, not knowing what to say to this strange, bitter woman.

"Much trouble!" Patience curtsied. She unlaced her arms, and used her hands as she spoke, like a Frenchwoman. She lacked the words that would express her thoughts and enforced and supplemented them with gesture. "Much trouble! You shall hear how I have been served. My father worked in this old lime quarry till it was abandoned, and when it stopped, then he was out of work for two months, and he went out poaching, and shot himself instead of a pheasant. He was not used to a gun. 'Twasn't the fault of the gun. The gun was good enough. When he was brought home dead, my mother went into one fainting fit after another, and I was born; but she died."