“Of _course_, I just thought that, and then Edward said, ‘So it shall be called after you—Arachne Mariana.’ I thought what _hideous_ names, but all I said was, ‘Oh, darling, but I want a boy’; and do you know, Liz, Edward had been talking about a spider all the time—the spider that Jack Webster sent him. I don’t believe he cares nearly as much for the baby, I really don’t, and I wish I was _dead_.” Mary sobbed afresh, and it took Elizabeth a good deal of her time to pacify her. Mrs. Havergill brought in tea, it being Sarah’s afternoon out. When she was taking away the tea-things, after Mary had gone, she observed: “Mrs. Mottisfont, she do look pale, ma’am.” “Mrs. Mottisfont is going to have a baby,” said Elizabeth, smiling. Mrs. Havergill appeared to dismiss Mary’s baby with a slight wave of the hand. “I ’ad a cousin as ’ad twenty-three,” she observed in tones of lofty detachment. “Not all at once?” said Elizabeth faintly. Mrs. Havergill took no notice of this remark. “Yes, twenty-three, pore soul. And when she wasn’t ’aving of them, she was burying of them. Ten she buried, and thirteen she reared, and many’s the time I’ve ’eard ’er say, she didn’t know which was the most trouble.” She went out with the tray, and later, when Sarah had returned, she repeated Mrs. Blake’s information in tones of sarcasm. “‘There’s to be a baby at the Mottisfonts’,’ she says, as if I didn’t know that. And I says, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and that’s all as passed.” Mrs. Havergill had a way of forgetting her own not inconsiderable contributions to a conversation. “‘Yes, ma’am,’ I says, expecting every moment as she’d up and say, ’and one ’ere, too, Mrs. Havergill,’ but no, not a blessed word, and me sure of it for weeks. But there—they’re all the same with the first, every one’s to be blind and deaf. All the same, Sarah, my girl, if she don’t want it talked about, she don’t, so just you mind and don’t talk, not if she don’t say nothing till the christening’s ordered.”