In those early days of Madoline’s infancy Mowser had taken possession of the nurseries as her own domain—belonging to her by some sovereign right of custodianship, as entirely hers as if they had been her freehold. Strong in her convictions on this point, she had resented all intrusion from the outer world; she had looked daggers at innocent visitors who were brought to see the baby; she had carried on war to the knife—a war of impertinences and uncivil looks—with Aunt Rhoda, firmly possessed by the idea that an aunt was an outsider as compared with a nurse. ‘Didn’t I sit up night after night with her when she had the scarlet-fever, and go without my sleep and rest for a fortnight?’ said the faithful one, expatiating vindictively upon her wrongs, in the conversational freedom of the servants’-hall. ‘Will any of your fine ladies of fashion do that?’ Mrs. Spicer was of opinion that some might, but not Miss Rhoda Lawford. She was a great deal too fond of her own comfort. Mowser was not a woman of high culture. She had begun the battle of life early, and was too old to have been subject to the exactions of the School Board. She had been born and bred in a Warwickshire village, and educated five-and-thirty years ago at a Warwickshire dame school. Gerald told Daphne that he had no doubt Mowser had every whit as much book-learning as Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden. She was not averse from the use of fine words, but pronounced them after her own fancy. All unauthorised visitors to the nursery she denounced as antelopes, meaning, it was supposed, not the graceful animal of the stag species usually known by that name, but the more obnoxious human individual commonly called an interloper. Even Daphne, when she took the liberty to be born, and was brought by her own particular nurse to Mowser’s nursery, was looked upon as belonging in some wise to the antelope family; while the strange nurse was, of course, a thoroughbred specimen of that race. While Daphne was an infant, and the second nurse remained, there were fearful wars and rumours of wars in Mowser’s apartments, and exultantly did that injured female lift up her voice when Daphne went to her first school—at an age when few children of the landed gentry are sent to school—and the unsanctified nurse departed. She came a Pariah, and she went a Pariah—a creature under a ban. ‘Now I can breathe free,’ exclaimed Mowser, after she had ostentatiously opened the windows and aired the nurseries, as in a Jewish household windows and doors are flung wide when the spirit has departed. ‘I felt almost stuffocated while she was here.’