Here's a story I found in Matilda's room.

It's called 'Wormwood.' I'm sure you'll like it." So placed that she could get all of the dim light that slanted through the tiny shuttered window, Mary began, her voice raised to meet the need of Mrs.De Peyster's aural handicap.

Now Marie Corelli may have been the favorite novelist of a certain amiable queen, who somehow managed to continue to the age of eighty-two despite her preference.
But Mrs.De Peyster liked no fiction; and the noble platitudes, the resounding moralizings, the prodigious melodrama, the vast caverns of words of the queen's favorite made Mrs.De Peyster writhe upon her second maid's undentable bed.

If only she actually did possess the divine gift of defective hearing with which Mr.Pyecroft had afflicted her! But in the same loud voice, trying to conceal her own boredom, Mary read on, on, on--patiently on.
At length Matilda returned.

Mary closed the book with a sigh of relief, which on the instant she repressed.
"I'll read to you for a while two or three times a day," she promised.
"I know what a comfort it is to a sick person to hear a story she likes." Mrs.De Peyster did not even thank her..