OUTLINES
III
LADY DOROTHY NEVILL
She had stayed, in a humble capacity, for a week in the ducal household. She had seen the troops of highly decorated human beings descending in couples to eat, and ascending in couples to bed. She had, surreptitiously, from a gallery, observed the Duke himself dusting the miniatures in the glass cases, while the Duchess let her crochet fall from her hands as if in utter disbelief that the world had need of crochet. From an upper window she had seen, as far as eye could reach, gravel paths swerving round isles of greenery and losing themselves in little woods designed to shed the shade without the severity of forests; she had watched the ducal carriage bowling in and out of the prospect, and returning a different way from the way it went. And what was her verdict? “A lunatic asylum.”
It is true that she was a lady’s-maid, and that Lady Dorothy Nevill, had she encountered her on the stairs, would have made an opportunity to point out that that is a very different thing from being a lady.
My mother never failed to point out the folly of work-women, shop-girls, and the like calling each other “Ladies”. All this sort of thing seemed to her to be mere vulgar humbug, and she did not fail to say so.
What can we point out to Lady Dorothy Nevill? that with all her advantages she had never learned to spell
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