mistress. Miss Matty assented, and quickly disappeared to change
the yellow ribbons, while Miss Barker came upstairs; but, as she
had forgotten her spectacles, and was rather flurried by the
unusual time of the visit, I was not surprised to see her return
with one cap on the top of the other. She was quite unconscious of
it herself, and looked at us, with bland satisfaction. Nor do I
think Miss Barker perceived it; for, putting aside the little
circumstance that she was not so young as she had been, she was
very much absorbed in her errand, which she delivered herself of
with an oppressive modesty that found vent in endless apologies.

Miss Betty Barker was the daughter of the old clerk at Cranford who
had officiated in Mr Jenkyns's time. She and her sister had had
pretty good situations as ladies' maids, and had saved money enough
to set up a milliner's shop, which had been patronised by the
ladies in the neighbourhood. Lady Arley, for instance, would
occasionally give Miss Barkers the pattern of an old cap of hers,
which they immediately copied and circulated among the elite of
Cranford. I say the elite, for Miss Barkers had caught the trick
of the place, and piqued themselves upon their "aristocratic
connection." They would not sell their caps and ribbons to anyone
without a pedigree. Many a farmer's wife or daughter turned away
huffed from Miss Barkers' select millinery, and went rather to the
universal shop, where the profits of brown soap and moist sugar
enabled the proprietor to go straight to (Paris, he said, until he
found his customers too patriotic and John Bullish to wear what the
Mounseers wore) London, where, as he often told his customers,
Queen Adelaide had appeared, only the very week before, in a cap
exactly like the one he showed them, trimmed with yellow and blue
ribbons, and had been complimented by King William on the becoming