“Nor a drop less neither,” says Ted. He showed her that all the money expended on improvements and insurance and such things were so much off something else. Ted was a generous chap—liked to see plenty of everything, even though he had to give some of it away. But you can’t make some women see some things.
“Not a roof to our heads, nor a floor to our feet, nor a pound to turn round on if a fire broke out,” Molly would say.
“But why should a fire break out?” he’d ask her. “There never has been a fire here, there never ought to be a fire here, and what’s more, there never will be a fire here, so why should there be a fire?”
And of course she let him have his own way, and they never had a fire there while he was alive, though I don’t know that any great harm would have been done anyways, for after a few years trade began to slacken off, and the place got dull, and what with the taxes it was not much more than a bread and cheese business. Still, there’s no matter of that: a man don’t ask for a bed of roses: a world without some disturbance or anxiety would be like a duckpond where the ducks sleep all day and are carried off at night by the foxes.
Molly was like that in many things, not really contrary, but no tact. After Ted died she kept on at “The Half Moon” for a year or two by herself, and regular as clockwork every month Pollock, the insurance manager, would drop in and try for to persuade her to insure the house or the stock or the furniture, any mortal thing. Well, believe you, when she had only got herself to please in the matter that woman wouldn’t have anything to say to that insurance—she never did insure, and never would.
“I wouldn’t run such a risk; upon my soul it’s flying in the face of possibilities, Mrs. Wickham”—he was a palavering chap, that Pollock; a tall fellow with sandy hair, and he always stunk of liniment for he had asthma on the chest—“A very grave risk, it is indeed,” he would say, “the Meazer’s family was burnt clean out of hearth and home last St. Valentine’s day, and if they hadn’t taken up a policy what would have become of those Meazers?”
“I dunno,” Molly says—that was the name Ted give her—“I dunno, and I’m sorry for unfortunate people, but I’ve my private reasons.”
She was always talking about her private reasons, and they must have been devilish private, for not a soul on God’s earth ever set eyes on them.
“Well, Mrs. Wickham,” says Pollock, “they’d have been a tidy ways up Queer Street, and ruin’s a long-lasting affair,” Pollock says. He was a rare palavering chap, and he used to talk about Gladstone, too, for he knew her family history; but that didn’t move her, and she did not insure.
“Yes, I quite agree,” she says, “but I’ve my private reasons.”