Now, Miss Amelia Wrigley was not only of a good figure, a pleasing face, and a sprightly wit, and with those promising prospects that are a mighty agreeable adjunct to personal charms; she was also fully aware of her own value. She knew to the decimal of an inch how far it was prudent to permit the thirsty youths who frequented the Royal Albert Hotel to go in their amorous advances. Of course, she must not be too frigid, and there were occasions when it was politic to be diplomatically hard of hearing. The ingenious Hebe who ministers to the pleasures of manufacturers, flushed by the frequent “friendly glasses” inseparable from the conduct of business on market-day, must affect not to hear many an innuendo that crapulous youth seems to think he may safely utter in the presence of a barmaid, though he would soundly trounce the fellow who should utter the like in the hearing of his sister in the domestic drawing-room. Poor Hebe’s face may glow with outraged modesty, her eyes may flash her indignation and resentment, but business requires that she should smile and smirk and say smooth things. Miss Amelia Wrigley was declared by many a young buck of Huddersfield to be “too stand-offish” for his taste, which required that a girl should be able “to give a joke and take a joke, don’t you know”; though the kind of joke required by this predilection to be given and taken was not defined with that precision beloved of the mathematician. But it may be put down to Mr. Sam Storth’s credit that this stand-offishness of the fair Amelia was very far from diminishing that lady’s attractiveness in his eyes.
“I like a larky girl as well as any man,” he confided to his partner, “and when I’m in for fun I don’t want to have to do with a condemned iceberg; but fun’s one thing and matrimony’s another and don’t you forget it. And when I place a lady at the head of my mahogany, I don’t want to think that every doddering idiot in Huddersfield that can sport a flash ring and chain has blown a cloud of cigarette smoke in her face and drawled out ‘Another special, Millie, my angel, and a smile with it.’ You don’t ‘Millie’ Amelia Wrigley, I can tell you.”
From which profound observation it may be inferred that in the conversation of which we have heard but a part, and of which, by your leave, good reader, we will take the liberty to hear more, Mr. Sam Storth could not boast of that self-assurance and complacency that usually marked his intercourse with the ladies he honoured with his acquaintance. In some mysterious way the talk had drifted, as talk between a young man and maid will drift, to the perilous subject of liking, of love, of the choice of a lover and so forth.
“I used to think I wasn’t a marrying man, Miss Amelia—I may call you that mayn’t I?—Miss Wrigley’s so formal, so cold, between friends, don’t you think?—not a marrying man by a long chalk. Seen so much billing and cooing in my time, and then a chain that can’t very well be broken with a cat at one end of it and a dog at the other. I always draw the line at that particular service in the Prayer Book that so appropriately begins with “dearly beloved” and ends with “amazement! But”—with a sigh that was intended to be sentimental, and a glance that was unmistakeably amorous—“but a man never knows his fate. How true it is that man proposes but God disposes.”
“Then man shouldn’t propose,” suggested the lady.
“Oh, do be serious, Miss Amelia, or may say I Amelia?”
“Certainly you may not say Amelia, Storth, at least not to me. Why should you?”
“Because, because oh! hang it Amelia, I mean Miss Amelia, you make it confounded difficult for a fellow. Jove! Isn’t it hot?”—and Mr. Storth mopped his troubled and moist brow with a vast bandana. “I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll have another pint of bitter, with a top on.”
Miss Wrigley rose, and, moving with stately ease to the pumps, drew a large tankard of the foaming beverage.
“I never knew such a man as you for beer, Mr. Storth.”