"Thank you, I will take soup. Allow me to help myself. I am sorry to have troubled you."
And I placed my hand on the back of her chair, presuming that she would get up; but she never stirred one inch, and actually called for a plate to help me. My guardian was looking at both of us, with a dry smile of amusement, and Clement began to simper and play with his fork.--Now for it, or never, thought I. "Mrs. Daldy, you quite mistake me, or pretend to do so. Have the goodness to quit _my_ chair."
She had presumed on my dread of an altercation before the servants, but only Thomas Henwood happened to be in the room. Had there been a dozen present, I would still have asserted my right. At last she rose in her stateliest manner, but with an awkward smile, and a still more awkward sneer.
"Your use, my poor child, of the possessive pronoun is far more emphatic than your good breeding is."
"Who cares for your opinion?" Not a hospitable inquiry; but then she was not _my_ visitor.
In grand style she marched to the door, but soon thought better of it, and came to her proper place with the sigh of a contrite spirit.
"Poor creature! It is a rebuke to me, for my want of true faith in the efficacy of prayer."
And after all this, she made a most excellent dinner.
About that woman there was something of a slimy pride, no more like to upright prickly self-respect than macerated bird-lime is to the stiff bright holly. Yet no one I ever knew possessed such wiry powers of irritation. Whenever my mother and my guardian met, she took care to be in the way, and watched them both, and appealed to me with all her odious pantomime of sorrow, sympathy, wonder, loving superiority, and spiritual yearnings. And all the time her noisome smile, like the smell of a snake, came over us. She knew, and rejoiced in the knowledge, how hard set I was to endure it, and every quick flash of my eyes only lit up her unctuous glory.
For all I know, it was natural that my antipathy to that woman should, by reaction, thaw sometimes my coldness towards my uncle. Though self-respect had at length compelled him to abandon his overtures to my friendship, now and then I detected him looking at me with a pitying regard. In self-defence, I began to pity him, and ceased to make faces or sneer when the maids--those romantic beings--declared that he must have been crossed in love. At this conclusion, long ago, all the servants' hall had arrived; and even little Tilly Jenkins, not admitted as yet to that high conclave, remarkable only for living in dust-bins, and too dirty to cause uneasiness to the under-shoeboy's mother--even that Tilly, I say, ran up to me one morning (when I went to see my dear pony) and beat out her dust, and then whispered: