"Then it is n't convenient for you to pay anything on account?" said Denry, more and more affable.
"Convenient!" she cried. "It's perfectly convenient, only I don't care to. I won't pay a penny until I am forced. Let Mr. Herbert Calvert do his worst, and then I 'll pay. And not before! And the whole town shall hear all about Mr. Herbert Calvert!"
"I see!" he laughed easily.
"Convenient!" she reiterated, contemptuously. "I think everybody in Bursley knows how my clientele gets larger and larger every year! ... Convenient!"
"So that's final, Miss Earp?"
"Perfectly," said Miss Earp.
He rose. "Then the simplest thing will be for me to send round a bailiff to-morrow morning, early." He might have been saying: "The simplest thing will be for me to send round a bunch of orchids."
Another man would have felt emotion, and probably expressed it. But not Denry, the rent-collector and manager of estates large and small. There were several different men in Denry, but he had the great gift of not mixing up two different Denrys when he found himself in a complicated situation.
Ruth Earp rose also. She dropped her eyelids and looked at him from under them. And then she gradually smiled.
"I thought I 'd just see what you 'd do," she said in a low confidential voice from which all trace of hostility had suddenly departed. "You 're a strange creature," she went on, curiously, as though fascinated by the problems presented by his individuality. "Of course I shan't let it go as far as that. I only thought I 'd see what you 'd say. I 'll write you to-night."