“I shall go to the concert,” I said, decidedly, “if it’s only for the sake of seeing Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.”
It occurs to me now, as I write, that perhaps that was the first time we heard their names thus coupled together—Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.
Chapter Two
Mrs. Fazackerly, whom we all call Nancy, lived with a very old father at Loman Cottage, just on the outskirts of Cross Loman.
No one, in speaking of her behind her back to anybody unaware of her history, is ever strong-minded enough to refrain from adding, “Her husband threw plates at her head.” The first time that this was said to Bill Patch, I remember, he inquired with interest if the late Mr. Fazackerly had been a juggler. It was explained to him then that the late Mr. Fazackerly had only been of a violent temper.
No one, however, has ever heard Nancy Fazackerly allude to the conjugal missiles that tradition has associated with her dinner table. She is, indeed, wholly silent about her short married life. She was twenty-seven years old, or thereabouts, when she married and went to live in London, and it was five years later when she came home, widowed and childless, to Cross Loman again.
About everything else Mrs. Fazackerly talked freely. We all knew that she and her father were entirely dependent upon his tiny pension, and it was common talk in Cross Loman that Mrs. Fazackerly would sell anything in the world if she could get cash payment for it.
Her astuteness over a bargain is only to be equalled by the astonishing unscrupulousness with which she recommends her own wares to possible or impossible purchasers.
Many people disapprove of her, but everyone is fond of her, perhaps because it is a sort of constitutional inability in her to say anything except the thing which her fatally reliable intuition tells her will be most acceptable to her hearer.
When she came up to tell Claire about her paying guest, she pretended that it was because she wanted to consult Claire upon the business side of the question. Claire, being naturally unpractical, and with far less business experience than Mrs. Fazackerly, was, of course, susceptible to the compliment.