: truly I was in a foreign land.
    The morrow made me further acquainted with Mrs. Sweeny. It seems she had
introduced herself to her present employer as an English lady in reduced
circumstances: a native, indeed, of Middlesex, professing to speak the English
tongue with the purest metropolitan accent. Madame - reliant on her own
infallible expedients for finding out the truth in time - had a singular
intrepidity in hiring service off-hand (as indeed seemed abundantly proved in my
own case). She received Mrs. Sweeny as nursery-governess to her three children.
I need hardly explain to the reader that this lady was in effect a native of
Ireland; her station I do not pretend to fix: she boldly declared that she had
»had the bringing-up of the son and daughter of a marquis.« I think, myself, she
might possibly have been hanger-on, nurse, fosterer, or washer-woman, in some
Irish family: she spoke a smothered brogue, curiously overlaid with mincing
cockney inflections. By some means or other she had acquired, and now held in
possession, a wardrobe of rather suspicious splendour - gowns of stiff and
costly silk, fitting her indifferently and apparently made for other proportions
than those they now adorned; caps with real lace borders, and - the chief item
in the inventory, the spell by which she struck a certain awe through the
household, quelling the otherwise scornfully disposed teachers and servants,
and, so long as her broad shoulders wore the folds of that majestic drapery,
even influencing madame herself - a real Indian shawl - »un véritable Cachmire,«
as Madame Beck said, with mixed reverence and amaze. I feel quite sure that
without this Cachmire she would not have kept her footing in the pensionnat for
two days: by virtue of it, and it only, she maintained the same a month.
    But when Mrs. Sweeny knew that I was come to fill her shoes, then it was
that she declared herself - then did she rise on Madame Beck in her full power -
then come down on me with her concentrated weight. Madame bore this revelation
and visitation so well, so stoically, that I for very shame could not support it
otherwise than with composure. For one little moment Madame Beck absented
herself from the room; ten minutes after, an agent of the police stood in the
midst of us. Mrs. Sweeny and her effects were removed. Madame's brow had not
been ruffled during the scene - her lips had not dropped one sharply accented
word.
    This brisk little affair of the dismissal was