'air of the 'ed an' clean it with your face, _that's_ what I'll do I
Understand? Oh, I mean what I say, my lady! Me an' you's a-goin' to
spend a evenin' together, there's no two ways about that. Ho ho! he
he!'

The frankness of Clem's brutality went far towards redeeming her
character. The exquisite satisfaction with which she viewed Jane's
present misery, the broad joviality with which she gloated over the
prospect of cruelties shortly to be inflicted, put her at once on a
par with the noble savage running wild in woods. Civilisation could
bring no charge against this young woman; it and she had no common
criterion. Who knows but this lust of hers for sanguinary domination
was the natural enough issue of the brutalising serfdom of her
predecessors in the family line of the Peckovers? A thrall suddenly
endowed with authority will assuredly make bitter work for the
luckless creature in the next degree of thraldom.

A cloth was already spread across one end of the deal table, with
such other preparations for a meal as Clem deemed adequate. The
sausages--five in number--she had emptied from the frying-pan
directly on to her plate, and with them all the black rich juice
that had exuded in the process of cooking--particularly rich,
owing to its having several times caught fire and blazed
triumphantly. On sitting down and squaring her comely frame to work,
the first thing Clem did was to take a long draught out of the
beer-jug; refreshed thus, she poured the remaining liquor into a
glass. Ready at hand was mustard, made in a tea-cup; having taken a
certain quantity of this condiment on to her knife, she proceeded to
spread each sausage with it from end to end, patting them in a
friendly way as she finished the operation. Next she sprinkled them