A Houseful of Girls | Page 9

tears of contrition in public, Annie, who shared her sister's room, heard her in the night crying softly.
"What ails you, Dora dear?" Annie sat up and asked sleepily. "What is the matter? It can't be, no," rousing herself, "it can not be--you don't mean that you repent what you've done, and would swallow the shop, foxy hair, and everything?"
"Oh, no," denied Dora, "but I didn't think a man would care like that; such a queer, gray shade came over his face, though I durst hardly look at him; and his hands which were--well, were holding mine for a second, you know----"
"No, I don't know," interrupted Annie, smiling to herself; "but go on, what about the hands?"
"They were as cold as ice."
"Very likely, it is only the month of April."
"And it is not above a year since he lost both his father and mother--all the near relations he had."
"Poor man!" admitted Annie. "But you could not help that, and many men, young men especially, seem to get on quite well without near relations."
There was a strain of hardness about pretty Annie, whether bred of that cynicism in the air of which May had complained, whether it was an integral part of Annie, or whether, as in the case of some valuable kinds of timber, it was merely an indication of the closer grain, the slower ripening, and the greater power of endurance of the moral fibre.
"Men are not like women." Annie was continuing her lecture. "I dare say Tom Robinson will do very well--all the better, perhaps, because he has no ambition, and is content to make money in the most humdrum way as a tradesman."
Dora sat up in turn, like a white ghost in her place in her little bed, seen by the dim light. She had the instinct which causes women to look back upon the men who have made love or proposed to them, even though the women have rejected the men--as in a sense their property, if not their prey, so as not by any means to relish the men's depreciation at the hands of other women. Then it becomes a point of honour alike with the proudest and the meekest of her sex to stand up in his absence in defence of the discarded swain.
"I don't know about ambition," began Dora hesitatingly, "but father says Tom Robinson is not at all stupid; he took his degree with credit at Cambridge, and was not plucked like poor Ned Hewett, or that fop, Cyril Carey. Father says when he worked with Mr. Robinson in getting up the bill to lay before Parliament for closing the old churchyard, he could not have desired a more intelligent, diligent fellow-worker. All the salesmen and women at 'Robinson's' have been well looked after, and are superior to the other shop-people in the town, don't you know? There is Miss Franklin at the head of both the millinery and mantua-making departments; I am sure she looks and speaks, as well as dresses, like a lady?"
"Yes, and everybody is civil to her, but nobody thinks of making her acquaintance out of the shop, and she is wise enough to keep to her proper sphere. They say she is a distant relation of Tom Robinson's--you see he is not altogether destitute of kindred. Why does the man not marry her? That would be a suitable match."
"Annie!" protested Dora, in nearly speechless indignation, and then she recovered breath and words. "She's forty if she's a day; and she's as fat as a pin-cushion, with her cheeks a mottled red all over."
"How can you make such unkind remarks on your neighbours' looks? He is not an Adonis, I may be allowed to say; and I have noticed that shopkeepers are apt to marry women older than themselves, women who have been in the trade--to keep the business together, I suppose."
"At least, his father did not marry like that either in his first or in his second marriage," retorted Dora; "for the first Mrs. Robinson was the daughter of a curate, and the second of a farmer, and she was not half his age, though she did not survive him long."
"As you please. What's Hecuba to me, or what am I to Hecuba?" demanded Annie airily.
"Besides," Dora returned laboriously to the charge, "there are shopkeepers and shopkeepers, as you must be aware, Annie. Father says old Mr. Robinson was a man of independent ideas and original mind, and had his own theories of trade."
"I have nothing to say against it, especially at this hour of the night, or morning," said Annie, professing to strangle a yawn; "only that I do not think a linen-draper's business, however large and well-conducted, is exactly the career of a gentleman, a man of fair ability and education. He might leave it to