ugliness of temper."

"Well, that's not so much matter," remarked the other man.
"These sour-tempered folks are mostly handy at business, and
know pretty well what they are about. But, as you say, I don't
think she'll do much. This business of keeping cent-shops is
overdone, like all other kinds of trade, handicraft, and bodily
labor. I know it, to my cost! My wife kept a cent-shop three
months, and lost five dollars on her outlay."

"Poor business!" responded Dixey, in a tone as if he were shaking
his head,--"poor business."

For some reason or other, not very easy to analyze, there had
hardly been so bitter a pang in all her previous misery about the
matter as what thrilled Hepzibah's heart on overhearing the above
conversation. The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully
important; it seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the
false light of her self-partialities, and so hideous that she dared
not look at it. She was absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and
idle effect that her setting up shop--an event of such breathless
interest to herself--appeared to have upon the public, of which
these two men were the nearest representatives. A glance; a passing
word or two; a coarse laugh; and she was doubtless forgotten before
they turned the corner. They cared nothing for her dignity, and just
as little for her degradation. Then, also, the augury of ill-success,
uttered from the sure wisdom of experience, fell upon her half-dead
hope like a clod into a grave. The man's wife had already tried the
same experiment, and failed! How could the born, lady the recluse of
half a lifetime, utterly unpractised in the world, at sixty years of