Dear mother, however, promised not to desert me in my trouble, and undertook to procure me a charwoman, who would come in until that Irish fury of a Cornwall hussey was ready to be with me. Mrs. Burgess[A] was the name of the charwoman, and mother said that I should find her of great use and comfort to me, as she was a married woman, though she had been deserted by her husband--poor thing!--who had run away to America like a brute, leaving her with a fine family of ten young children on her hands;--that she was a good, hard-working, industrious, stout-made woman; and that the poor babes had nothing but the sweat of their mother’s brow to subsist upon; and that it was only by doing a little charing out and a little washing at home, that the poor creature was enabled to keep her head above water. And mother said, that tired and wet as she was, still she would make it a point that very afternoon to go round to the Mews, where Mrs. Burgess lived, and leave word at her loft, even if she couldn’t see her, for her to come round to me the first thing the next morning; adding, that all the poor thing would want would be eighteenpence a day, two pots of beer, and a glass of spirits before leaving at night. When Edward came home from business, he wouldn’t make the least allowance for the state I was in, but seemed determined to find fault with everything, and appeared to expect that the house should be in the same apple-pie order as if I’d a regiment of maids of all work at my heels. What made him much worse, too, was, that the baker had forgotten to send round the dinner when it was done, so that he had to wait some trifling twenty minutes until I could get some one to run for it; and when it came home, I declare my nice little toad in the hole was as black as a coal, and quite burnt to a cinder. My husband’s behaviour during dinner nearly broke my heart; and he cut me up so dreadfully, that I really couldn’t say whether my head was on my shoulders or not. Indeed, all that evening he was one too many for me, for I declare he went on just like one beside himself. He made his dinner off bread and cheese, and kept grumbling all the time, saying that he would have been better treated if he had dined at a common “_Slap bang_” in the City, (those were his very words--though what on earth a “slap bang” can be I haven’t the remotest idea). So I left him to his filthy cigar and bills of costs as soon as I could, and went down stairs and sat by myself all alone by the kitchen fire, as I wished to put an end to his spiteful goings on, and I knew he wouldn’t follow me down stairs, and get pulling me over the coals there.