into their passive hands, pushed
them out of the carriage into the wet.

Hilton, the maid shared by Susie and Anna, had then to be found and
urged to clamber down quickly on to the low platform, where she stood
helplessly, the picture of injured superiority, hustled by the hurrying
porters and passengers, out of whose way she scorned to move, while Anna
went to look for the luggage and have it put into the cart that had been
sent for it.

This cart was an ordinary farm cart, used for bringing in the hay in
June, but also used for carrying out the manure in November; and on a
sack of straw lying in the bottom it was expected that Hilton should
sit. The farm boy who drove it, and who helped the porter to tie the
trunks to its sides lest they should too violently bump against each
other and Hilton on the way, said so; the coachman of the carriage
waiting for the _Herrschaften_ pointed with his whip first at Hilton and
then at the cart, and said so; the porter, who seemed to think it quite
natural, said so; and everybody was waiting for Hilton to get in, who,
when she had at length grasped the situation, went to Susie, who was
looking frightened and pretending to be absorbed by the sky, and with a
voice shaken by passion, and a face changing from white to red,
announced her intention of only going in that cart as a corpse, when
they might do with her as they pleased, but as a living body with breath
in it, never.

Here was a difficulty. And idlers, whose curiosity was not
extinguishable by wind and sleet, began to press round, and people who
had come by the same train stopped on their way out to listen. The farm
boy patted the sack and declared that it was clean straw, the coachman
stood up on his box and swore that it was a new sack, the porter assured
the Fraeulein that it was as comfortable as a feather bed, and nobody
seemed to understand that what she was being offered was an insult.

Susie was afraid of Hilton, who had been in the service of duchesses,
and who held these duchesses over her mistress's head whenever her
mistress wanted to do anything that was inconvenient to herself; quoting
their sayings, pointing out how they would have acted in any given case,
and always, it appeared, they had done exactly what Hilton desired.
Susie's admiration for duchesses was slavish, and Hilton was treated
with an indulgent liberality that was absurd compared to the stinginess
displayed towards everyone else. Hilton was not