She knew the poor of the place well, and took a lively interest in all
that concerned them; and occasionally she would confide some of her own
odd observations and reflections to me.
"On Sunday morning all the women wash their doorsteps," she told me; "I
think it is part of their religion."
And on another occasion she said: "They have such lovely children here,
and such swarms of them. I am always hard on the women with lovely
children. People say it is envy, hatred, malice, and all
uncharitableness, that makes me so; but it really is because I think
women who have nice children should be better than other women. It
would be worse for one of them to do a wrong thing than for poor
childless me."
This conclusion may be quarrelled with as illogical, but the feeling
that led to it was beautiful beyond question; and, indeed, all her
ideas on that subject were beautiful.
She went once, soon after she came among us, to comfort a lady in the
neighbourhood who had lost a baby at its birth.
"It is sad that you should lose your child," Ideala said to her; "but
you are better off than I am, for I never knew what it was to be a
mother."
She would have thought it a privilege to have experienced even the
sorrows of maternity.
Talking about the people, she told me: "They draw such nice
distinctions. They speak of 'a lady' and 'a real lady.' A 'real lady'
is a person who gives no trouble. If Mrs. Vanbrugh wants anything from
the butcher, and he has already sent to her house once that day, she
does not expect him to send again; she sends to him--and she is 'a real
lady.' Mrs. Stanton is also thoughtful, but she is something more; she
is sociable and kind, and talks to them all in a friendly way, just as
if they were human beings; and she is something more than 'a real
lady'--she's 'a real nice lady.'
"Do you know Mrs. Polter at the fish-shop? What a fine-looking woman
she is! Middle-aged, intelligent, and a very good specimen of her
class, I should think. She has eight children already, and would
consider the ninth a further blessing. Her husband is a good-looking
man, too, and most devoted. In fact, they are quite an ideal pair with
their eight children and their fish-shop. He had to go to Yarmouth the
other day to buy bloaters, and while he was away she went by the five
o'clock train every morning to choose the day's supply of fish for the
shop, and he was quite unhappy about it. He was afraid she would
'overdo' herself, and rather than that should happen he desired her to
let the business go to the--ahem! He made her write every day to say
how she was, and was wretched till he returned to relieve her of her
arduous duties. She made friends with me during the scarlet fever
epidemic. Number eight was a baby then, and she was afraid he might
catch the disease and be taken to the hospital and die for want of her;
and I sympathised strongly with her denunciations of the cruelty of the
act. Fancy taking little babies from their mothers! Barbarous, don't
you think it? One day a lady came into the shop while I was there. She
was dressed in a bright pink costume, with a large hat all smothered in
pink feathers. I thought of the Queen of Sheba, and felt alarmed. Mrs.
Polter told me afterwards she was 'just a lady,' rolling in recently
acquired wealth, and 'as hard to please as if she had never washed her
own doorstep.' It was then I learnt the difference between 'a lady' and
'a real lady.'"
One of Ideala's exploits got into the paper somehow, and she was
annoyed about it, and anxious to make us believe the account of the
risk she ran had been greatly exaggerated. I was present when she gave
her own version of the story, which was characteristic in every way.
"I heard frantic cries from the river," she said. "Some one was
shrieking, 'The child will be drowned!' and I ran to see what was the
matter. A man was tearing up and down on the bank, a child was
struggling in the water, and as there was nobody else to be seen he
looked to _me_ for assistance! I advised him to go in and bring
the child out, but the idea did not appear to commend itself to him, so
he took to running up and down again, bawling, 'The child will be
drowned!' And indeed it seemed very likely; so I was obliged to go in
and bring it out myself. The man was overjoyed when I restored it to
him. He clasped it in his arms with every demonstration of affection;
and then he looked at me and became embarrassed. He evidently felt that
he ought to say something, but the difficulty was what to say. At last
a bright idea seemed to strike him. His countenance cleared, and he
spoke with much feeling. 'I am afraid you are rather wet,' he observed;
and then he left me, and a sympathetic landlady, who keeps a little
public-house by the river, and had witnessed the occurrence, took me in
and dried me. She gave me whisky and hot water, and entertained me for
the rest of the afternoon. She is a remarkable woman, and I should
visit her often were it not for her love of, and faith in, whisky and
hot water. I tell her there are five things which make the nose red--
viz., cold, tight-lacing, disease of the right side of the heart,
dyspepsia, and alcohol, and the greatest of these is alcohol; but she
says a little colour anywhere would be an improvement to me, and I feel
that I can have nothing in common with a woman who has such bad taste
in the distribution of colour."