("What a perfect old darling he is!" she said to herself.)




CHAPTER V

A SALUTATION


As they walked down Moorthorne-road towards the town they certainly made
a couple piquant enough, by reason of the excessive violence of the
contrast between them, to amuse the eye of the beholder. A young and
pretty woman who spends seventy pounds a year on her ornamentations,
walking by the side of a little old man (she had the better of him by an
inch) who had probably not spent seventy pounds on clothes in sixty
years--such a spectacle must have drawn attention even in the least
attentive of towns. And Bursley is far from the least attentive of
towns. James and his great-stepniece had not got as far as the new
Independent Chapel when it was known in St. Luke's-square, a long way
farther on, that they were together; a tramcar had flown forward with
the interesting fact. From that moment, of course, the news, which
really was great news, spread itself over the town with the rapidity of
a perfume; no corner could escape it. All James's innumerable tenants
seemed to sniff it simultaneously. And that evening in the mouth of the
entire town (I am licensing myself to a little poetical exaggeration)
there was no word but the word "Jimmy."

Their converse, as they descended into the town, was not effective. It
was, indeed, feeble. They had fought a brief but bitter duel, and James