Mrs. Puddephatt, though Dunberry-born, was a comparative acquisition to the village, to which she had been summoned, and to her natural succession in No. 3, the Playstow, through the death of an only sister without encumbrances. She had, in fact, gone very young, a great many years ago, into service in London, and had never set foot again in her native place until this inheritance, now two years old, had called her. She brought with her an ironic atmosphere of the great world, and a disdainful tolerance towards the little, in which her lot was now to vegetate. She had, in her high experience, “’tweenied,” “obliged,” scullery-maided, kitchen-maided, house-maided, parlour-maided, and old-maided; and she had somehow emerged from this five-fold chrysalis of virginity the widow Puddephatt—no one knew by what warrant, other than that of a sort of waspish charity-girl cap, with a knuckle-bone frill round her face. But then her knowledge of men was so matrimonial that it was admitted nothing but a husband could have inspired it. Her dictums, in respect to this mystic experience, were merum sal to the wives of Dunberry.
“Look in the pot for your new gownd,” and “The way to a man’s purse is through his mouth,” may be bracketed for utterances cryptic to the “general,” but not to their delighted understandings.
“A hopen ’and comes empty ’ome.”
“A man shuts his sweet’art’s mouth with a kiss, but his wife’s heyes.”
“Be careful of a Saturday morning to mend the ’ole in your man’s pocket.”
“When your ’usband talks of his hage, be sure he means yours.”
Such and the like shrewd axioms served the widow Puddephatt at least as well as marriage lines; and, if more were needed, her mastery of the exact science of nagging and of the conquering resource of hysterics supplied it. Sometimes, it was whispered, she was to be seen in her front garden viciously dusting a man’s coat with a stick; and on this moral implication alone, late tavern roysterers, lurching home after closing-time past the little wicket where she was often to be seen watching spectral and ironic, had been known to slink by, meanly conscious of deserting, and surrendering into her gloating hands a purely imaginary Puddephatt, their late boon companion.
This tremendous lady undertook the care of us with infinite condescension, and, hearing that we were Londoners bred, gathered us at once under the protection of her maternal and metropolitan wing.
“Lork, Fancy-Maria!” she would say, with an air of amused tolerance towards the little Suffolk rawbones who “generalled” for her; “we don’t breathe on the knives and polish ’em in our haprons in London!” Or, “That won’t do, Fancy-Maria! We know better in London than to dust the ’ot plates with our helbers.”
With this shibboleth of sarcastic comparison, she had won, not only Fancy-Maria, but all feminine Dunberry to a perspiring emulation of her gentility, so that in the course of her two years the social code had grown quite elevated, and it was no longer fashionable to dine in one’s shirt-sleeves.