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Updated: May 4, 2025
"You're always talking about what people did when you were young," said Caroline, turning away abruptly. "I know that. Things is very altered since my day," said Mrs. Creddle. "But there's some things " "I've no patience with people like you, aunt," said Caroline. "You know everything has changed, and yet you go on expecting girls to be the one thing that hasn't. It isn't common sense."
"Is Miss Wilson at home this afternoon, do you know?" then fell into step by Caroline's side without thinking of it. "Yes. Were you wanting to see her?" said Caroline; but underneath, she was saying to herself: "If I'd done what Aunt Creddle wanted, and been a servant out and out, I should never have walked with Mr. Wilson like this."
She remembered that her aunt had been in service as a girl, and that no self-respecting maid-servant of those days would have walked out late at night with a man who was a relative of their mistress, nor would any decent-living gentleman have suggested such a thing. But Aunt Creddle forgot that she was a business girl self-poised, making her own position in the world as she chose.
"You know perfectly well that Miss Ethel would let you go out nearly every night," ejaculated Mrs. Creddle. "You're talking just for the sake of talking." Then she suddenly began to cry. "I can't bear for one of mine to behave like that and I've always looked on you as my own child," she said, whimpering through a corner of her apron. "I've been poor all my life, but my word's been my bond.
At last Godfrey came through, but he did not seem real to her. She was so exhausted by her own emotion and by the shock of Miss Ethel's death, that she was actually indifferent to him for the moment. "Do you think I ought to go for Aunt Creddle?" she said tonelessly. "They will want some one to help."
Creddle could wish that she was behaving badly. Then Miss Ethel chanced to notice Caroline's blouse, which was made from her own summer dress of twenty years ago, and an irrepressible wave of hurt exasperation swept over her, rousing her to active resentment. "I must say I think you are treating me abominably, Caroline.
No doubt she had been wandering about with some man. She went to the Creddles, intending to stay the night there, but Creddle brought her back." "Oh, I feel sure she really did lose the key," said Laura. "It is a thing I have done myself before now. And I'm sure I never wandered about at night with young men." "But she pretended that she had been here earlier and was unable to make anyone hear.
She began to cry. Then she tried to pull herself together. After all, it could not be very late. What an idiot to be standing there crying, when Aunt Creddle lived only a ten minutes' walk away! Of course she could go and stay the night there. Very likely Aunt Creddle might be still up, for she took in washing for one or two people, and sometimes did the ironing after the children were in bed
It was true, then, that Godfrey had only been behaving to her all the time as Aunt Creddle said gentlemen did behave to working girls upon whom they bestowed their attentions. She'd been treated exactly like any little ignorant servant girl waiting at a street corner for her young man: just such a one as her aunts and her mother had been; and yet she felt violently that she was different.
The children made fun of her on her way home from school, and called her "daft Lizzie"; the old folks, when they heard her muttering to herself, would shrug their shoulders and pass the remark that she was "nobbut a hauf-rocked 'un" an insult peculiarly galling to her mother. "A hauf-rocked 'un!" she would exclaim. "Nay, I rocked her misel i' t' creddle while my shackles fair worked.
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