"What's the use of telling me lies?"
In her anger that a woman of fifty should behave like a child and come
cringing to a girl because she wanted to sit where she had not leave to
sit, she did not think of the particular case, and, unpacking her music,
soon forgot all about the old woman and her sheets.
Mrs. Chailey folded her sheets, but her expression testified to flatness
within. The world no longer cared about her, and a ship was not a home.
When the lamps were lit yesterday, and the sailors went tumbling above
her head, she had cried; she would cry this evening; she would cry
to-morrow. It was not home. Meanwhile she arranged her ornaments in the
room which she had won too easily. They were strange ornaments to
bring on a sea voyage--china pugs, tea-sets in miniature, cups stamped
floridly with the arms of the city of Bristol, hair-pin boxes crusted
with shamrock, antelopes' heads in coloured plaster, together with a
multitude of tiny photographs, representing downright workmen in their
Sunday best, and women holding white babies. But there was one portrait
in a gilt frame, for which a nail was needed, and before she sought it
Mrs. Chailey put on her spectacles and read what was written on a slip
of paper at the back:
"This picture of her mistress is given to Emma Chailey by Willoughby
Vinrace in gratitude for thirty years of devoted service.
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