Explore "A Waif's Progress" by Rhoda Broughton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
As Miss Ransome was not aware of having made even the ally alluded to by Mr. Tancred overnight, it was with a very self-distrustful heart that next morning she appeared in the breakfast-room, to find her host and hostess waiting for her. It was one of the rules of Camilla's old-fashioned code of politeness that it is as inadmissible to begin breakfast without a guest as to go in to dinner before he or she has appeared, and many a sleepy visitor had cursed this cruel civility.
Bonnybell had made what appeared to herself superhuman efforts to keep pace with the detestably unanimous clocks, that apparently, from every recess and landing-place in the house, admonished her of the flight of the minutes. For Claire and her daughter time had been not. Her apprenticeship in Hill Street had been neither long nor strict enough to uproot the habits of a lifetime; and though she had scamped her hair, and entirely omitted to underline her eyes, those eyes informed Bonnybell, on the authority of the relentlessly ticking accuser that faced her as she hurried in, that she was ten minutes late.