Hilda retired within the kitchen out of sight of the lobby. She knew
that the child in her would compel her to wait like a child until the
visitor was gone, instead of issuing forth boldly like a young woman.
But to Florrie the young mistress with her stern dark mask and
formidable eyebrows and air of superb disdain was as august as a
goddess. Florrie, moving backwards, had now got nearly to the scullery
door with her wringing and splashing and wiping; and she had dirtied
even her face. As Hilda absently looked at her, she thought somehow of
Mr. Cannon's white wristbands. She saw the washing and the ironing of
those wristbands, and a slatternly woman or two sighing and grumbling
amid wreaths of steam, and a background of cinders and suds and
sloppiness.... All that, so that the grand creature might have a rim of
pure white to his coat-sleeves for a day! It was inevitable. But the
grand creature must never know. The shame necessary to his splendour
must be concealed from him, lest he might be offended. And this was
woman's loyalty! Her ideas concerning the business of domesticity were
now mixed and opposing and irreconcileable, and she began to suspect
that the bases of society might be more complex and confusing than in
her youthful downrightness she had imagined.


II

"Well, you've got your way!" said Mrs. Lessways, with a certain grim,
disdainful cheerfulness, from which benevolence was not quite absent.
The drastic treatment accorded to her cold seemed to have done it good.
At any rate she had not resumed the flannel petticoat, and the nasal
symptoms were much less pronounced.

"Got my way?" Hilda repeated, at a loss and newly apprehensive.