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But even so secluded a place as Cheasing Eyebright could not rest for
long in the theory of Hypertrophy--Contagious or not--in view of the
growing hubbub about the Food. In a little while there were painful
explanations for Mrs. Skinner--explanations that reduced her to
speechless mumblings of her remaining tooth--explanations that probed
her and ransacked her and exposed her--until at last she was driven to
take refuge from a universal convergence of blame in the dignity of
inconsolable widowhood. She turned her eye--which she constrained to be
watery--upon the angry Lady of the Manor, and wiped suds from her hands.
"You forget, my lady, what I'm bearing up under."
And she followed up this warning note with a slightly defiant:
"It's 'IM I think of, my lady, night and day."
She compressed her lips, and her voice flattened and faltered: "Bein'
et, my lady."
And having established herself on these grounds, she repeated the
affirmation her ladyship had refused before. "I 'ad no more idea what I
was giving the child, my lady, than any one could 'ave...."
Her ladyship turned her mind in more hopeful directions, wigging Caddles
of course tremendously by the way. Emissaries, full of diplomatic
threatenings, entered the whirling lives of Bensington and Redwood.
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