Mary Marston | Page 5

you! Certain sure I am that it ain't my fault if
we're not friends."
Mary made no reply. She could not help understanding what George
meant, and she flushed, with honest anger, from brow to chin. But,
while her dark-blue eyes flamed with indignation, her anger was not
such as to render her face less pleasant to look upon. There are as many
kinds of anger as there are of the sunsets with which they ought to end:
Mary's anger had no hate in it.
I must now hope my readers sufficiently interested in my narrative to
care that I should tell them something of what she was like. Plainly as I
see her, I can not do more for them than that. I can not give a portrait of
her; I can but cast her shadow on my page. It was a dainty half-length,
neither tall nor short, in a plain, well-fitting dress of black silk, with
linen collar and cuffs, that rose above the counter, standing, in spite of
displeasure, calm and motionless. Her hair was dark, and dressed in the
simplest manner, without even a reminder of the hideous occipital
structure then in favor--especially with shop women, who in general
choose for imitation and exorbitant development whatever is ugliest
and least lady-like in the fashion of the hour. It had a natural wave in it,
which broke the too straight lines it would otherwise have made across
a forehead of sweet and composing proportions. Her features were
regular--her nose straight--perhaps a little thin; the curve of her upper
lip carefully drawn, as if with design to express a certain firmness of
modesty; and her chin well shaped, perhaps a little too sharply defined
for her years, and rather large. Everything about her suggested the
repose of order satisfied, of unconstrained obedience to the laws of
harmonious relation. The only fault honest criticism could have
suggested, merely suggested, was the presence of just a possible
nuance of primness. Her boots, at this moment unseen of any, fitted her
feet, as her feet fitted her body. Her hands were especially good. There
are not many ladies, interested in their own graces, who would not have
envied her such seals to her natural patent of ladyhood. Her speech and
manners corresponded with her person and dress; they were direct and
simple, in tone and inflection, those of one at peace with herself.

Neatness was more notable in her than grace, but grace was not absent;
good breeding was more evident than delicacy, yet delicacy was there;
and unity was plain throughout.
George went back to his own side of the shop, jumped the counter, put
the cover on the box he had left open with a bang, and shoved it into its
place as if it had been the backboard of a cart, shouting as he did so to a
boy invisible, to make haste and put up the shutters. Mary left the shop
by a door on the inside of the counter, for she and her father lived in the
house; and, as soon as the shop was closed, George went home to the
villa his father had built in the suburbs.

CHAPTER II
.
CUSTOMERS.
The next day was Saturday, a busy one at the shop. From the
neighboring villages and farms came customers not a few; and ladies,
from the country-seats around, began to arrive as the hours went on.
The whole strength of the establishment was early called out. Busiest in
serving was the senior partner, Mr. Turnbull. He was a stout, florid man,
with a bald crown, a heavy watch-chain of the best gold festooned
across the wide space between waistcoat-button-hole and pocket, and a
large hemispheroidal carbuncle on a huge fat finger, which yet was his
little one. He was close-shaved, double-chinned, and had cultivated an
ordinary smile to such an extraordinary degree that, to use the common
hyperbole, it reached from ear to ear. By nature he was good-tempered
and genial; but, having devoted every mental as well as physical
endowment to the making of money, what few drops of spiritual water
were in him had to go with the rest to the turning of the mill-wheel that
ground the universe into coin. In his own eyes he was a strong
churchman, but the only sign of it visible to others was the strength of
his contempt for dissenters--which, however, excepting his partner and
Mary, he showed only to church-people; a dissenter's money being, as
he often remarked, when once in his till, as good as the best
churchman's.

To the receptive eye he was a sight not soon to be forgotten, as he bent
over a piece of goods outspread before a customer, one hand resting on
the stuff, the other on the