'Why, Mrs. Phillips, just come down stairs, please; I want to speak to
you.--Come into the library, only Mr. D'Aubrey is here.'

(Humph! ONLY Mr. D'Aubrey!--'Oh, for to-morrow!')

Enter Mrs. Phillips, one of those fat, pylygastric nurses, who divide
the twenty-four hours into four days, so as to have three meals to each
of their diurnal revolutions; whose digestive organs, if they could
speak, would strike for wages; whose eyes move but never look; their
atmosphere--what Germans might call expression--being that of massive
rest.

She slides into the room and immediately sits down, moving her eyes up
to her mistress with a patient and slightly suffering expression, while
the process of deglutition is slowly going on.

I seize a book, pamphlet, anything, hold it in front of my face, and
bite my segar in two.

'Did I understand you to say, Mrs. Phillips, that Susan had gone to sit
up with a _small pox_ patient?'

'Her nephew, yes marm.'

'Oh, how very wrong in her--how--'

'I don't think so, marm.'

I ground my teeth.