Mr Whittaker was very proud of the good taste and good order of his cemetery, and took a great deal of trouble to have everything kept as it should be.
Even Martha, in whose favourite literature lonely churchyards and silent tombs were often to be met with, never thought of connecting the sentiment which they evoked with the nice tidy rows of modern monuments among which she lived. Aunt Lizzie occasionally pointed a moral by hoping her nieces would remember that they might soon be lying beneath them; but they never regarded the remark as anything more than a flower of speech.
Florence got in just in time for tea, to find her father giving Mrs Stroud the history of some transactions he had lately had with the “Board,” in which he had brought over all the gentlemen to see that he was right as regarded certain by-laws.
Mr Whittaker was a round-faced, rosy man, like his younger children. He was a very respectable, hard-working man, and a kind father; but he thought a good deal of his own importance and of the importance of his situation, and a good deal of his conversation consisted in impressing his own good management on his hearers. He would have been almost as much put out with Martha for wanting what she had not got as he had been with the one of his children who had brought him into disrepute. Florrie’s misdemeanours had never come across him, and she did not know what his displeasure would be like. She knew quite well what that of her brother George could be, and enjoyed provoking it. George was an irreproachable youth, and aimed at being a gentleman. He was of the dark and slender type, like Martha, and cultivated a quiet style of dress and manner. He sang in the choir of another church in the town, and was friendly with the clergy and church officials. It was a new line of departure for the Whittakers, and an excellent one; but somehow George rather liked to keep it to himself, and did not encourage his sisters to attend his church, or follow his example in religious matters.
Florrie came in, and as soon as tea was over, and her father and aunt were out of hearing, she amused herself with scandalising George and Martha by boasting of how she had shocked Carrie and Ada through stopping to talk to Liza and Polly. She omitted to mention either Mrs Lee or the cause of the walk by the river. There were limits to the home endurance, and even Florence, when not worked up to delightful defiance, was aware of their existence.
Chapter Three.
Don’t Care!
Mrs Lee was a widow. She kept a small, but very superior, ‘Fancy Repository’ in a good street in Rapley. Her daughter helped her to manage the business, and Florence Whittaker was being trained up as an assistant. Idleness was not one of Florrie’s failings, and, as she was quick, neat-handed, and willing, she gave tolerable satisfaction, though Mrs Lee considered her lively, free and easy manners to pleasant customers, and her short replies to troublesome ones, as decidedly “inferior,” and not what was to be expected in such an establishment as hers. Florence, however, was gradually acquiring a professional manner, which she kept for business hours, as too many girls do, apparently regarding refinement and gentleness as out of place when she was off duty.