The Judge would answer promptly:
“What, for instance?”
He was, in his way, a shrewd man as a man who knows a trifle about horses is apt to be. He asked purposely, because, since the spinsters of Roseborough were each and all “homey” women, domestic by training, he had found that their suggestions, when followed out, added to the comfort of his bachelor life.
Encouraged by his receptivity, the lady would express her idea and even offer to come and assist “dear Mrs. Taite” in putting it into effect. More than one damsel had spent her half hour mounted on a kitchen stool, with her mouth full of tacks, while dear Mrs. Taite handed the hammer back and forth and made mental note of defects in the aspirant’s figure to retail later to the judge, who liked what he called “a well-turned woman.” To retain her paying guest was Mrs. Taite’s life-work.
To tell the truth, the Judge had been in no haste to woo. He was not touched with Romeo’s fever. His temperament was judicial and calm. He was—it may again be remarked—shrewd. He knew to a penny exactly what his monthly income could do for him in the way of providing a Roseborough gentleman’s requisites, and he was in little danger of deliberately seeking to curtail his small personal luxuries by taking a dowerless wife. So he listened the more appreciatively to his landlady’s analyses of the dispositions and physical characteristics of Roseborough’s spinsters.
“Knowledge is power,” he would aver with a solemn sort of waggishness, when she had permitted him to gather, from her discourse, that there was not an ankle among the lot which would dare show itself in a plain white stocking; or that a certain melting-eyed one’s shoulder blades or hip bones were “at least no sharper than her temper.” He knew from other of Mrs. Taite’s hints—dropped generally while stirring a hot cup of chocolate for his nightcap and buttering a toasted scone to accompany it, that some young ladies who owned to twenty-six would never see thirty-three again, and that a baby-waisted white muslin frock was no longer the badge of a guileless heart, as it had been in the days when she wore one to induce that maiden’s shock, the first kiss.
What with Mrs. Taite’s chocolate and subtlety and the judge’s legal technicalities, it will be seen that the Roseborough spinsters were out-generalled. They had once been a threat; but, nowadays, there was scarcely the aroma of danger surrounding them. Mrs. Taite felt that the menace to her came from another quarter. It had (as she mentally phrased it) “struck upon her bosom and fairly winded her” one evening when Judge Giffen had remarked, between chocolate sips, that Mrs. Mearely had received him that afternoon in a black-and-white striped gown. Unlike Mr. Albert Andrews, the Judge rather prided himself on having an eye for feminine apparel.
“And she looked uncommonly well in it, too,” he added. “A very well-turned woman is Mrs. Mearely. Yes, Mrs. Taite, I believe poor dear Mearely’s taste to have been as infallible in that case as in every other.”
“Mr. Hibbert Mearely had the large means necessary to indulge a woman of such extravagant fancies.” In Mrs. Taite’s voice there was a tremolo as she shot the only dart she could find at that moment, knowing, alas, that it was unbarbed save to her own heart.
“And now she has the means, and none to please but herself.”