“I believe I am,” he said. “And why I took to tailoring beats me, now. My father was a butcher.”
I pointed over my shoulder towards the village. “Do you live in a place like that?” I asked.
“Better than that,” he answered proudly. “It took me nearly two years to find the place my sister and I had dreamed of. We wanted a cottage in a county as much like a garden as possible. I found it—in Devonshire; my eye, it’s a wonderful place, all orchards. In the blossom time it looks like—well, as if it was expecting somebody, it’s so beautiful.”
“I know,” I said. “Sometimes the country dresses itself as if a lover were coming.”
“Do you ever read Browning?” he asked. “Because he answers a lot of questions for me.”
“For me too.”
“Well,” he said, and reddened shyly as he said it; “do you remember the poem that ends
‘What if that friend happened to be God?’”
I understood perfectly. He was a man of soul, my tailor.
“I expect you are surprised to find I read a lot,” he went on in his artless way. “But when I was a boy I was in a book shop, before my father lost all his money, and put me out to be a tailor. My mother was a lady’s maid, and she encouraged me to read. There was a priest, Father Brown, who helped me too; it was from him I first learned to love flowers.”