"You know why I don't ask for him so often as I might, I suppose?" said
Winterborne. "Or don't you know?"
"I think I do."
"Because of the houses?"
She nodded.
"Yes. I am afraid it may seem that my anxiety is about those houses,
which I should lose by his death, more than about him. Marty, I do feel
anxious about the houses, since half my income depends upon them; but I
do likewise care for him; and it almost seems wrong that houses should
be leased for lives, so as to lead to such mixed feelings."
"After father's death they will be Mrs. Charmond's?"
"They'll be hers."
"They are going to keep company with my hair," she thought.
Thus talking, they reached the town. By no pressure would she ride up
the street with him. "That's the right of another woman," she said,
with playful malice, as she put on her pattens. "I wonder what you are
thinking of! Thank you for the lift in that handsome gig. Good-by."
He blushed a little, shook his head at her, and drove on ahead into the
streets--the churches, the abbey, and other buildings on this clear
bright morning having the liny distinctness of architectural drawings,
as if the original dream and vision of the conceiving master-mason,
some mediaeval Vilars or other unknown to fame, were for a few minutes
flashed down through the centuries to an unappreciative age. Giles saw
their eloquent look on this day of transparency, but could not construe
it. He turned into the inn-yard.
Marty, following the same track, marched promptly to the
hair-dresser's, Mr. Percombe's. Percombe was the chief of his trade in
Sherton Abbas. He had the patronage of such county offshoots as had
been obliged to seek the shelter of small houses in that ancient town,
of the local clergy, and so on, for some of whom he had made wigs,
while others among them had compensated for neglecting him in their
lifetime by patronizing him when they were dead, and letting him shave
their corpses. On the strength of all this he had taken down his pole,
and called himself "Perruquier to the aristocracy."
Nevertheless, this sort of support did not quite fill his children's
mouths, and they had to be filled. So, behind his house there was a
little yard, reached by a passage from the back street, and in that
yard was a pole, and under the pole a shop of quite another description
than the ornamental one in the front street. Here on Saturday nights
from seven till ten he took an almost innumerable succession of
twopences from the farm laborers who flocked thither in crowds from the
country. And thus he lived.