Mrs.Svini (I presume this was Mrs.
Svini, Anglice or Hibernice, Sweeny)--Mrs.Sweeny's doom was in Madame Beck's eye--an immutable purpose that eye spoke: Madame's visitations for shortcomings might be slow, but they were sure.

All this was very un-English: 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 a hanger-on, nurse, fosterer, or washerwoman, in some Irish family: she spoke a smothered tongue, 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 veritable cachemire," as Madame Beck said, with unmixed reverence and amaze.