doesn t hold with black hersel .
I hate black things, said Mary.
The dressing process was one which taught them both something. Martha
had buttoned up her little sisters and brothers but she had never
seen a child who stood still and waited for another person to do things
for her as if she had neither hands nor feet of her own.
Why doesn t tha put on tha own shoes? she said when Mary quietly
held out her foot.
My Ayah did it, answered Mary, staring. It was the custom.
She said that very often It was the custom. The native servants were
always saying it. If one told them to do a thing their ancestors had
not done for a thousand years they gazed at one mildly and said, It is
not the custom and one knew that was the end of the matter.
It had not been the custom that Mistress Mary should do anything but
stand and allow herself to be dressed like a doll, but before she was
ready for breakfast she began to suspect that her life at Misselthwaite
Manor would end by teaching her a number of things quite new to
her things such as putting on her own shoes and stockings, and picking
up things she let fall. If Martha had been a well-trained fine young
lady s maid she would have been more subservient and respectful and
would have known that it was her business to brush hair, and button
boots, and pick things up and lay them away. She was, however, only an
untrained Yorkshire rustic who had been brought up in a moorland
cottage with a swarm of little brothers and sisters who had never
dreamed of doing anything but waiting on themselves and on the younger
ones who were either babies in arms or just learning to totter about
and tumble over things.
If Mary Lennox had been a child who was ready to be amused she would
perhaps have laughed at Martha s readiness to talk, but Mary only
listened to her coldly and wondered at her freedom of manner. At first
she was not at all interested, but gradually, as the girl rattled on in
her good-tempered, homely way, Mary began to notice what she was
saying.
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