Page:Live and Let Live.djvu/89

 it should be me, and not mammy,' she said, 'Well, you are the oddest woman!' and retreated to the parlour to laugh at my peculiarities."

"I do not wonder it struck Sabina as strange—but in the situation you were in—so dependant on mammy—you were quite right."

"I should have been right in any situation, my dear Anne. Sabina's exclamation is a most apt illustration of the abuses of nine tenths of the world of this relation. It has passed into a proverb with me, and scarcely a day goes by that I am not reminded of those unlucky words, Why don't you let mammy burn her fingers?"

Mrs. Ardley did not quite admit her friend's inferences, but she was entertained with her facts. "Had you no one but mammy," she asked, "all the time you lived at Hydedale?" "Yes, occasional services I could always procure; for though, as I told you, money would not buy labour, yet our farmers' girls said, 'Mr. and Mrs. Hyde had such friendly ways that they loved to work for them,' and mammy, always a favourite, was a sort of decoy bird to them. You may have seen my seamstress Paulina."

"The nice girl you told me made the children's dresses?" "The same. She was a poor child whom I took, in country phrase, 'to bring up.' A treasure she has proved. She is now so accomplished that she can earn more than I can afford to pay her, and she is about leaving me to go as a first hand to a dressmaker."

"Then you do meet with ingratitude as well as the rest of the world?" H2