not like her at all.

Nobody liked this irruption into the downstairs rooms; the two "gave
trouble,"--a dire offence; Nannie's sense of duty to her charge led to
requests and demands that took my mother's breath away. Eggs at unusual
times, the reboiling of milk, the rejection of an excellent milk
pudding--not negotiated respectfully but dictated as of right. Nannie
was a dark, longfeatured, taciturn woman in a grey dress; she had a
furtive inflexibility of manner that finally dismayed and crushed and
overcame. She conveyed she was "under orders"--like a Greek tragedy. She
was that strange product of the old time, a devoted, trusted servant;
she had, as it were, banked all her pride and will with the greater,
more powerful people who employed her, in return for a life-long
security of servitude--the bargain was nonetheless binding for being
implicit. Finally they were to pension her, and she would die the hated
treasure of a boarding-house. She had built up in herself an enormous
habit of reference to these upstairs people, she had curbed down all
discordant murmurings of her soul, her very instincts were perverted or
surrendered. She was sexless, her personal pride was all transferred,
she mothered another woman's child with a hard, joyless devotion that
was at least entirely compatible with a stoical separation. She treated
us all as things that counted for nothing save to fetch and carry for
her charge. But the Honourable Beatrice could condescend.

The queer chances of later years come between me and a distinctly
separated memory of that childish face. When I think of Beatrice, I
think of her as I came to know her at a later time, when at last I came
to know her so well that indeed now I could draw her, and show a hundred
little delicate things you would miss in looking at her. But even then I
remember how I noted the infinite delicacy of her childish skin and the
fine eyebrow, finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the
breast of a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little
girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky hair
that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were sometimes
impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow. And from the very
outset, after a most cursory attention to Rabbits, she decided that the
only really interesting thing at the tea-table was myself.

The elders talked in their formal dull way--telling Nannie the trite
old things