"About Mr Loggerheads!" Mary Morfe echoed, and stared back at Eva. And the atmosphere seemed to have been thrown into a strange pulsation.
Here perhaps I ought to explain that it was not the peculiarity of Mr Loggerheads' name that produced the odd effect. Loggerheads is a local term for a harmless plant called the knapweed (centaurea nigra), and it is also the appellation of a place and of quite excellent people, and no one regards it as even the least bit odd.
"I'm told," said Eva, "that he's going into the Hanbridge Choir!"
Mr Loggerheads was the principal tenor of the Bursley Glee and Madrigal Club. And he was reckoned one of the finest "after-dinner tenors" in the Five Towns. The Hanbridge Choir was a rival organization, a vast and powerful affair that fascinated and swallowed promising singers from all the choirs of the vicinity. The Hanbridge Choir had sung at Windsor, and since that event there had been no holding it. All other choirs hated it with a homicidal hatred.
"I'm told," Eva proceeded, "that the Birmingham and Sheffield Bank will promote him to the cashiership of the Hanbridge Branch on the understanding that he joins the Hanbridge Choir. Shows what influence they have! And it shows how badly the Hanbridge Choir wants him."
(Mr Loggerheads was cashier of the Bursley branch of the Birmingham and Sheffield Bank.)
"Who told you?" asked Mary Morfe, curtly.
Richard Morfe said nothing. The machinations of the manager of the Hanbridge Choir always depressed and disgusted him into silence.
"Oh!" said Eva Harracles. "It's all about." (By which she meant that it was in the air.) "Everyone's talking of it."
"And do they say Mr Loggerheads has accepted?" Mary demanded.