Miss Million's Maid: A Romance of Love and Fortune
John Stuart Mill · en
All the confidence with which she'd faced the wardress last night seemed
to have evaporated in those hours of wakeful tossing on that vilely
uncomfortable prison bed. She trembled and shook. She held on to the
bar of the dock just as a very sea-sick passenger holds on to the
steamer rail. She picked at her gloves, she nervously smoothed the
creases in her pink, Bond Street tub-frock.
When the magistrate addressed her she started and gulped, and murmured
"Sir" in the most utterly stricken voice I ever heard.
Altogether, if ever a young woman did look as if her sins had found her
out, Miss Nellie Million, charged with stealing a valuable ruby pendant,
the property of Mr. Julius Rattenheimer, looked the part at that moment.
I don't wonder the magistrate rasped at her.
As for me, I don't think I looked quite as frightened. You can't be at
the same moment frightened and very angry.
I felt like murder; whom I should have wished to murder I don't quite
know--the owner of the ruby alone would not have been enough for me. I
was inwardly foaming with rage over having been forced into this idiotic
position; also for having been made, not only mentally, but physically
and acutely uncomfortable.
This is only one detail of the discomfort, but this may serve to sum up
the rest; for the very first time in the whole of my life I'd had to go
without my morning bath, and to stand fully dressed, but with the
consciousness of being untubbed and unscrubbed, facing the world!
There was such a horrible lot of the world to face, too, in that awful
police-court, where the windows were steaming and opaque, and the walls
clammy as those of an uncared-for country vestry!
The place seemed crowded with all sorts and conditions of men and women,
lumped together, so to speak, in Fate's lucky-bag. And it was only after
I'd given two or three resentful glances about that stuffy cave of a
place that I recognised among all the strangers the faces of the people
who'd come to back up Miss Million and me.
First and foremost, of course, there sat, as close to us as she could
manage to get herself placed, the sumptuous, peg-top-shaped, white-clad
figure of London's Love, Miss Vi Vassity, with her metallic hair.
She kissed her plump hand to us with effusion, waving encouragingly to
us with her big gold mesh bag and all its glittering, clashing
attachments: the cigarette case, the lip-salve tube, the gold pencil,
the memorandum tablets, the Darin powder-box, the card-case, the
Swastika, the lucky pig, the touchwood, the gold-tipped coral charm, the
threepenny bit, and all the other odd things that rattled and jingled
together like a pedlar's cart, making an unearthly stir in court.
From where I stood I could see two men sketching the owner of all this
clatter!