Both women were about the same age, and so nearly the same size that the maid could wear any of her mistress’s garments without alteration. But if they had been creatures from separate planetary systems, if each had been formed by a completely different protoplasm, the contrast between them could not have been more extreme.
Nora was not an ill-favoured woman. She had a mass of fairly abundant black hair which she brushed over to the side. Her face, had it not been for the distempered look which drink and her own baffled fury had now given it, would have been pleasant and attractive. There was warmth in it, but there was also a trace of that wild fierceness which belongs to something lawless in nature, at once coarse and delicate, murderous, tender, and savagely ebullient. She still had a trim figure, which wore neatly the well-cut skirt of rough green plaid which her mistress had given her (for, because of her long service, she was recognised as a kind of unofficial captain to the other maids and was usually not required to wear maid’s uniform). But where the figure of the mistress was small of bone and fine of line and yet at the same time lavish and seductive, the figure of the maid was, by contrast, almost thick and clumsy-looking. It was the figure of a woman no longer young, fresh, and fertile, but already heavied, thickened, dried, and hardened by the shock, the wear, the weight, and the slow accumulation of intolerable days and merciless years, which take from people everything, and from which there is no escape.
No—no escape, except for her, the maid was thinking bitterly, with a dull feeling of inarticulate outrage, and for her, for her, there was never anything but triumph. For her the years brought nothing but a constantly growing success. And why? Why?
It was here, upon this question, that her spirit halted like a wild beast baffled by a sheer and solid blank of wall. Had they not both breathed the same air, eaten the same food, been clothed by the same garments, and sheltered by the same roof? Had she not had as much—and as good—of everything as her mistress? Yes—if anything she had had the better of it, for she would not drive herself from morning to night, she thought with contemptuous bitterness, the way her mistress did.
Yet here she stood, baffled and confused, glowering sullenly into the shining face of the other woman’s glorious success—and she saw it, she knew it, she felt its outrage, but she had no word to voice her sense of an intolerable wrong. All she knew was that she had been stiffened and thickened by the same years that had given the other woman added grace and suppleness, that her skin had been dried and sallowed by the same lights and weathers that had added lustre to the radiant beauty of the other, and that even now her spirit was soured by her knowledge of ruin and defeat while in the other woman there coursed for ever an exquisite music of power and control, of health and joy.
Yes, she saw it plainly enough. The comparison was cruelly and terribly true, past the last atom of hope and disbelief. And as she stood there before her mistress with the weary distemper in her eyes, enforcing by a stern compulsion the qualities of obedience and respect into her voice, she saw, too, that the other woman read the secret of her envy and frustration, and that she pitied her because of it. And for this Nora’s soul was filled with hatred, because pity seemed to her the final and intolerable indignity.
In fact, although the kind and jolly look on Mrs. Jack’s lovely face had not changed a bit since she had greeted the maid, her eye had observed instantly all the signs of the unwholesome fury that was raging in the woman, and with a strong emotion of pity, wonder, and regret she was thinking:
“She’s been at it again! This is the third time in a week that she’s been drinking. I wonder what it is—I wonder what it is that happens to that kind of person.”