Chapter 20 - Page 2

characterised her appeal as such
a "gime," such a "shime," as one had never had to put up with; a
third treated with some vigour the question of the enormous sums due
belowstairs, in every department, for gratuitous labour and wasted zeal.
Our young lady's consciousness was indeed mainly filled for several
days with the apprehension created by the too slow subsidence of her
attendant's sense of wrong. These days would become terrific like the
Revolutions she had learnt by heart in Histories if an outbreak in the
kitchen should crown them; and to promote that prospect she had through
Susan's eyes more than one glimpse of the way in which Revolutions are
prepared. To listen to Susan was to gather that the spark applied to
the inflammables and already causing them to crackle would prove to
have been the circumstance of one's being called a horrid low thief for
refusing to part with one's own. The redeeming point of this tension
was, on the fifth day, that it actually appeared to have had to do with
a breathless perception in our heroine's breast that scarcely more as
the centre of Sir Claude's than as that of Susan's energies she had soon
after breakfast been conveyed from London to Folkestone and established
at a lovely hotel. These agents, before her wondering eyes, had combined
to carry through the adventure and to give it the air of having owed
its success to the fact that Mrs. Beale had, as Susan said, but just
stepped out. When Sir Claude, watch in hand, had met this fact with the
exclamation "Then pack Miss Farange and come off with us!" there had
ensued on the stairs a series of gymnastics of a nature to bring Miss
Farange's heart into Miss Farange's mouth. She sat with Sir Claude in
a four-wheeler while he still held his watch; held it longer than any
doctor who had ever felt her pulse; long enough to give her a vision
of something like the ecstasy of neglecting such an opportunity to
show impatience. The ecstasy had begun in the schoolroom and over the
Berceuse, quite in the manner of the same foretaste on the day, a little
while back, when Susan had panted up and she herself, after the hint
about the duchess, had sailed down; for what harm then had there been in
drops and disappointments if she could still have, even only a moment,
the sensation of such a name "brought up"? It had remained with her that
her father had foretold her she would some day be in the street, but it
clearly wouldn't be this day, and she felt justified of the preference
betrayed to that parent as soon as her visitor had set Susan in motion
and laid his hand, while she waited with him, kindly on her own. This
was what the Captain, in Kensington Gardens, had done; her present
situation reminded her a