It came to pass that Mrs. Berry, having certain business that led her
through Kensington Gardens, spied a figure that she had once dandled in
long clothes, and helped make a man of, if ever woman did. He was
walking under the trees beside a lady, talking to her, not indifferently.
The gentleman was her bridegroom and her babe. "I know his back," said
Mrs. Berry, as if she had branded a mark on it in infancy. But the lady
was not her bride. Mrs. Berry diverged from the path, and got before
them on the left flank; she stared, retreated, and came round upon the
right. There was that in the lady's face which Mrs. Berry did not like.
Her innermost question was, why he was not walking with his own wife?
She stopped in front of them. They broke, and passed about her. The
lady made a laughing remark to him, whereat he turned to look, and Mrs.
Berry bobbed. She had to bob a second time, and then he remembered the
worthy creature, and hailed her Penelope, shaking her hand so that he put
her in countenance again. Mrs. Berry was extremely agitated. He
dismissed her, promising to call upon her in the evening. She heard the
lady slip out something from a side of her lip, and they both laughed as
she toddled off to a sheltering tree to wipe a corner of each eye. "I
don't like the looks of that woman," she said, and repeated it
resolutely.

"Why doesn't he walk arm-in-arm with her?" was her neat inquiry.
"Where's his wife?" succeeded it. After many interrogations of the sort,
she arrived at naming the lady a bold-faced thing; adding subsequently,
brazen. The lady had apparently shown Mrs. Berry that she wished to get
rid of her, and had checked the outpouring of her emotions on the breast
of her babe. "I know a lady when I see one," said Mrs. Berry. "I
haven't lived with 'em for nothing; and if she's a lady bred and born, I
wasn't married in the church alive."