Why, if one sewed one's finger to the bone, one would have one's work undone the next time they went to the laundry." Her voice in its indignation wavered as if tears were near.
There was nothing for it but to descend and inspect a large pile of linen heaped upon a table.

Mrs.Chailey handled the sheets as if she knew each by name, character, and constitution.

Some had yellow stains, others had places where the threads made long ladders; but to the ordinary eye they looked much as sheets usually do look, very chill, white, cold, and irreproachably clean.
Suddenly Mrs.Chailey, turning from the subject of sheets, dismissing them entirely, clenched her fists on the top of them, and proclaimed, "And you couldn't ask a living creature to sit where I sit!" Mrs.Chailey was expected to sit in a cabin which was large enough, but too near the boilers, so that after five minutes she could hear her heart "go," she complained, putting her hand above it, which was a state of things that Mrs.Vinrace, Rachel's mother, would never have dreamt of inflicting--Mrs.Vinrace, who knew every sheet in her house, and expected of every one the best they could do, but no more.
It was the easiest thing in the world to grant another room, and the problem of sheets simultaneously and miraculously solved itself, the spots and ladders not being past cure after all, but-- "Lies! Lies! Lies!" exclaimed the mistress indignantly, as she ran up on to the deck.

"What's the use of telling me lies ?" In her anger that a woman of fifty should behave like a child and come cringing to a girl because she wanted to sit where she had not leave to sit, she did not think of the particular case, and, unpacking her music, soon forgot all about the old woman and her sheets.
Mrs.Chailey folded her sheets, but her expression testified to flatness within.

The world no longer cared about her, and a ship was not a home.
When the lamps were lit yesterday, and the sailors went tumbling above her head, she had cried; she would cry this evening; she would cry to-morrow.