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Her hair, something browner than auburn, put Emilia's in the shade; her brows, darker even than dark Patty's, were broader and more nobly arched; her transparent skin, her colour she defied the sunrays carelessly, and her cheeks drank them in as potable gold clarifying their blood made Nancy's seem but a dairymaid's complexion.
Grateful and beautiful indeed was this mysteriously softened light to the ladies round the table, and for a brief space they almost LOVED Maryllia. For HER face was flushed, and quite uncooled by powder 'like a dairymaid's she will get so coarse if she lives in the country always! Mrs. Bludlip Courtenay confided softly to Lord Charlemont, who vaguely murmured 'Ah! Yes!
Sometimes wreathing garlands of, wild flowers, reclined on a sunny bank, while a flock of sheep strolled around, and the bold little lambs came to peep in our faces, and then gallop away in pretended alarm; sometimes tearing our clothes to tatters in an ardent hunt for the sweet filberts that hung high above our heads, on trees well fortified behind breastworks of bramble and thorn; sometimes cultivating the friendship while we quaffed the milk of the good-natured cows under the dairymaid's operation: all was freedom, mirth, and peace.
Breakfast dull, and most of the party cross: Aunt Horsingham is generally out of humour at breakfast-time, particularly on Sundays. Cousin Amelia suggested my towels were too coarse: "they had rubbed a colour into my cheeks like a dairymaid's." John said I looked like a rose a tea-rose, he added, as I handed him his cup.
Edith was generally to be found with her hair tucked tight off her face and enveloped in a coarse dairymaid's apron, and Ada, when she ran downstairs, would do so with a housemaid's dusting-brush at her girdle, and they were neither of them, when so attired, in the least afraid of encountering Captain Clayton as he would come out from their father's room.
And this morning, my own dear cunning papa, weren't you as bare as winter twigs? "Tomorrow perhaps we will have a day in the country." To go and see the nest? Only, please, not a big one. A real nest; where mama and I can wear dairymaid's hat and apron all day the style you like; and strike roots. We've been torn away two or three times: twice, I know.
She is up at daylight superintending the feeding of the stock, the butter-making, the sending off of the milk for sale; a thousand things get done while most people are fast asleep, and before lazy folk are well at breakfast she is off in her pony-carriage to the other farms on the place, to rate the "mamsells," as the head women are called, to poke into every corner, lift the lids off the saucepans, count the new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, any careless dairymaid's ears.
Even the early elder shoots, which do make an approach to springiness, look brown, and the small leaves of the woodbine, which have also ventured to peep forth, are of a sad purple, frost-bitten, like a dairymaid's elbows on a snowy morning. The very birds, in this season of pairing and building, look chilly and uncomfortable, and their nests! 'Oh, Saladin! come away from the hedge!
Todd's household affairs seem to have divided her attention that evening with the talk in the farmhouse parlour. She could only tell me that it was 'just the news, meaning, I suppose, that they all talked as usual about each other." "The dairymaid's memory may be better than her mother's," I said. "It may be as well for you to speak to the girl, Miss Halcombe, as soon as we get back."
But when her work with them was done, she would throw herself into charity organization cases, into efforts for the protection of workhouse servants, into the homeliest acts of ministry toward the sick, till her dowdy little figure and her face, which but for the stress of London, of labor, and of poverty, would have had a blunt fresh-colored dairymaid's charm, became symbols of a divine and sacred helpfulness in the eyes of hundreds of straining men and women.
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