for truth, but it is safe to say she had never before met it in so uncompromising and disagreeable a shape.
"Perhaps when you are quite through with your billingsgate," she finally said, "you will take yourself off my steps before you are ejected. You! to presume to criticize me! You, that are so low in the scale of being, you can no more understand my feelings and motives than a jellyfish can comprehend a star! Go back and tell Miss Mary," she went on majestically, as she gained confidence and breath, "that it is her duty and business to find the children, since they were last seen with her, and unless she proves more trustworthy they will not be allowed to return to her. Tell her, too, that when she wishes to communicate with me, she must choose some other messenger besides you, you impudent, grovelling little earthworm! Get out of my sight, or you will unfit me for my classes!"
Mrs. Grubb was fairly superb as she launched these thunderbolts of invective; the staircase her rostrum, her left hand poised impressively on the baluster, and the three snaky strands of brown hair that had writhed out of the waving-pins hissing Medusa-wise on each side of her head.
