It distressed me, it did indeed distress me, to hear her say that. She was so young and so lonely–and she bore it so well!
Bruff's impression of Rachel is very different from Miss Clack, but similar to the affectionate tone of Betteredge. I would be interested in running a word frequency count on all of the ways Rachel is described by the different narrators and do a comparison between the words used by the different narrators and also which words they share in her description.