‘I hate this place and everybody in it, excepting you. I suppose it’s Christmas makes me think of the old farm.’
‘I remember you said once that you thought you would like a town.’
‘Ah, I said so then. I should love to see them meadows again. The snow when it melts there doesn’t go to dirty, filthy slush as it does in Brighton. But it’s the people here I can’t bear. I could fly at that Poulter and that Goacher at times, no matter if I was had up for it.’
‘You forget what a hard life you had with Mrs. Wootton at the Hatch.’
‘No, I don’t forget. She had a rough tongue, but she was one of our set. She got as good as she gave. She spoke her mind, and I spoke mine, and there was an end to it. But this lot—they are so stuck-up and stuck-round. I never saw such folk in our parts—they make me feel as if I were the dirt under their feet.’
‘Never mind them. I have more to put up with than you have. You know all; you may be sure, if I could help it, I shouldn’t be here.’
‘I do know all. I shouldn’t grieve if that stepmother of yours drank herself to death. O Lord, when I see what you have to go through I am ashamed of myself. But you were made one way and I another. You dear, patient creature!’
‘It’s half-past eleven. It is time to go to bed.’
They went to their cold lean-to garrets under the slates.
Miss Toller lay awake for hours. This, then, was Christmas Eve, one more Christmas Eve. She recollected another Christmas Eve twenty years gone. She went out to a party, she and her father and mother and sister; mother and sister now dead. Somebody walked home with her that clear, frosty night. Strange! Miss Toller, Brighton lodging-house keeper, always in black gown—no speck of colour even on Sundays—whose life was spent before sinks and stoves, through whose barred kitchen windows the sun never shone, had wandered in the land of romance; in her heart also Juliet’s flame had burned. A succession of vivid pictures of her girlhood passed before her: of the garden, of the farmyard and the cattle in it, of the river, of the pollard willows sloping over it, of Barton Sluice covered with snow—how still it was at that moment—the dog has been brought inside because of the cold, and is asleep in the living-room—her father, is he awake? the tall clock is ticking by the window, she could hear its slow beats, and as she listened she fell asleep, but was presently awakened by the bells proclaiming the birth in a manger. She remembered that Mrs. Poulter had to be called at seven that she might go to an early service. She hastily put on her clothes and knocked at the door, but Mrs. Poulter decided that, as it was freezing, it would not be safe to venture, and having ordered a cup of tea in her bedroom at half-past eight, turned round and fell asleep again.