Now although Amelia’s mamma’s acquaintances were too polite to complain before her face, they made up for it by what they said behind her back.  In allusion to the poor lady’s ineffectual remonstrances, one gentleman said that the more mischief Amelia did, the dearer she seemed to grow to her mother.  And somebody else replied that however dear she might be as a daughter, she was certainly a very dear friend, and proposed that they should send in a bill for all the damages she had done in the course of the year, as a round robin to her parents at Christmas.  From which it may be seen that Amelia was not popular with her parents’ friends, as (to do grown-up people justice) good children almost invariably are.

If she was not a favourite in the drawing-room, she was still less so in the nursery, where, besides all the hardships naturally belonging to attendance on a spoilt child, the poor Nurse was kept, as she said, “on the continual go” by Amelia’s reckless destruction of her clothes.  It was not fair wear and tear, it was not an occasional fall in the mire, or an accidental rent or two during a game at “Hunt the Hare,” but it was constant wilful destruction, which Nurse had to repair as best she might.  No entreaties would induce Amelia to “take care” of anything.  She walked obstinately on the muddy side of the road when Nurse pointed out the clean parts, kicking up the dirt with her feet; if she climbed a wall she never tried to free her dress if it had caught; on she rushed, and half a skirt might be left behind for any care she had in the matter.  “They must be mended,” or “They must be washed,” was all she thought about it.

“You seem to think things clean and mend themselves, Miss Amelia,” said poor Nurse one day.

“No, I don’t,” said Amelia, rudely.  “I think you do them; what are you here for?”

But though she spoke in this insolent and unlady-like fashion, Amelia really did not realize what the tasks were which her carelessness imposed on other people.  When every hour of Nurse’s day had been spent in struggling to keep her wilful young lady regularly fed, decently dressed, and moderately well behaved (except, indeed, those hours when her mother was fighting the same battle down-stairs); and when at last, after the hardest struggle of all, she had been got to bed not more than two hours later than her appointed time, even then there was no rest for Nurse.  Amelia’s mamma could at last lean back in her chair and have a quiet chat with her husband, which was not broken in upon every two minutes, and Amelia herself was asleep; but Nurse must sit up for hours wearing out her eyes by the light of a tallow candle, in fine-darning great, jagged, and most unnecessary holes in Amelia’s muslin dresses.  Or perhaps she had to wash and iron clothes for Amelia’s wear next day.  For sometimes she was so very destructive, that towards the end of the week she had used up all her clothes and had no clean ones to fall back upon.