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I think there is; Miss Proddle made a bright speech, that's all." Miss Tonker, utterly bewildered, took refuge in solemn and supercilious disregard; as if she saw the joke, and considered it quite beneath remark. "You will please resume your work, and remember the rules," she said, and sailed down upon the cutters' table.
"One's too fast, and another's too slow, but the sun goes round exactly the same." Miss Tonker came back, and the talk hushed. "Clock struck one, and down they run, hickory, dickory, dock," said Miss Proddle, deliberately, so that her voice brought up the subsiding rear of sound and was heard alone.
Not one of those girls who had been talking had anything like a home. What was there for them at the year's end, after the wearing round and round of daily toil, but the diminishing dream of a happier living that might never come true? The fading away out of their health and prettiness into "old things like Miss Proddle and Aunt Blin," to take their turn then, in being snubbed and shoved aside?
Miss Proddle was another of those old girls who, like Miss Bree among the young ones, have outlived and lost their Christian names, with their vivacity. Never mind; it is the Christian name, and the Lord knows them by it, as He did Martha and Mary. "Reductio ad absurdum," put in Grace Toppings, who had been at a High School, and studied geometry.
"I shall have to give it up," she whispered emphatically into Bel Bree's ear. "It's no use your asking me to go to Chapel any more. I ain't sanctified a grain. I did begin to think there was a kind of work of grace begun in me, but I can't stand Miss Proddle! What are people made to strike ten for, always, when it's eleven?" "I think we are all striking twelve" said Bel Bree.
"Take a plague, make it out seven times as bad as it is, so that it's perfectly ridiculous and impossible, and then laugh at it. Next time you put your finger on it, as the Irishman said of the flea, it isn't there." "That's hommerpathy," said Miss Proddle. "Hommerpathy cures by aggravating." Miss Proddle was tiresome; she always said things that had been said before, or that needed no saying.
Only the poor, pale, worn-out ones, like Emma Hollen, who coughed and breathed short, and could not spend strength even in listening, amidst the conflicting whirr of the feeds and wheels, and the old, sobered-down, slow ones, like Miss Bree and Miss Proddle, button-holing and gather-sewing for dear life, with their spectacles over their noses, and great bald places showing on the tops of their bent heads, kept time with silent thoughts to the beat of their treadles and the clip of their needles against the thimble-ends.
She turned the folds of the card with one hand, and adjusted her spectacles with the other. "Bedford and Lincoln. Why, that's close by where Miss Proddle boards!" "That's the box, Auntie. You always forget the fire isn't in the box." "Well, it will be if they don't get along with their steamers. I ain't heard one go by yet." "They haven't any horses, you know." "Hark! there's one now! O, do hush!
I'll make it nights, and earn me an ostrich band for my hat," said Elise Mokey. One spoke for one thing; one another; they were claimed beforehand, in this fashion, by a kind of work-women's code; as publishers advertise foreign books in press, and keep the first right by courtesy. Miss Proddle stopped her machine at last, and caught the news in her slow fashion hind side before.
"Go home to bed, old Cuddy Garth," said Liza, "and sup more poddish, and take some of the wrinkles out of your wizzent skin." "Setting yer cap at the Rays boys," continued Mrs. Garth, "but it'll be all of no use to ye, mark my word. Old Angus never made a will, and the law'll do all the willin', ye'll see." "Don't proddle up yon matter again, woman," said Liza. "And dunnet ye threep me down.
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