That Mrs. Bundle was to be her
successor I gathered from allusions to "your great fat bouncing women
that would eat their heads off; but as to cleaning out a nursery--let
them see!" But her most masterly stroke was a certain conversation
with Mrs. Cadman carried on in my hearing.
"Have you ever notice, Mrs. Cadman," inquired my bony nurse of her not
less bony visitor--"Have you ever notice how them stout people as
looks so good-natured as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths is
that wicked and cruel underneath?" And then followed a series of
nurse's most ghastly anecdotes, relative to fat mothers who had
ill-treated their children, fat nurses who had nearly been the death
of their unfortunate charges, fat female murderers, and a fat
acquaintance of her own, who was "taken" in apoplexy after a fit of
rage with her husband.
"What a warning! what a moral!" said Mrs. Cadman. She meant it for a
pious observation, but I felt that the warning and the moral were for
me. And not even the presence of Rubens could dispel the darkness of
my dreams that night.
Alternately goaded and caressed by my nurse, who now laid aside a
habit she had of beating a tattoo with her knuckles on my head when I
was naughty, to the intense confusion and irritation of my brain, I
at last resolved to beg my father to let her remain with us.
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