Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 1.djvu/23

 she heard it crash around her she couldn't forbear the attempt to save at least some of the material. 'Really—really,' she panted, ' he never had to do with any one but the nobility!'

Mrs. Bowerbank surveyed her hostess with an expressionless eye. 'My dear young lady, what does a respectable little body like you, that sits all day with her needle and scissors, know about the doings of a wicked low foreigner that carries a knife? I was there when she came in, and I know to what she had sunk. Her conversation was choice, I assure you.'

'Oh, it's very dreadful, and of course I know nothing in particular,' Miss Pynsent quavered. 'But she wasn't low when I worked at the same place with her, and she often told me she would do nothing for any one that wasn't at the very top.'

'She might have talked to you of something that would have done you both more good,' Mrs. Bowerbank remarked, while the dressmaker felt rebuked in the past as well as in the present. 'At the very top, poor thing! Well, she's at the very bottom now. If she wasn't low when she worked, it's a pity she didn't stick to her work; and as for pride of birth, that's an article I recommend your young friend to leave to others. You had better believe what I say, because I'm a woman of the world.'

Indeed she was, as Miss Pynsent felt, to whom all this was very terrible, letting in the cold light of the penal system on a dear, dim little theory. She had cared for the child because maternity was in her nature, and this was the only manner in which fortune had put it in her path to become a mother. She had as few belongings as the baby,