“You’ve got,” said I, “a poor opinion of men.”
“’Tisn’t my opinion—’tis my mother’s,” said she.
I felt there was nothing to be said to that. It would have been unseemly on my part—who have only just found my own youth—to disagree with an opinion of such long standing.
You must understand that Miss Taviner could never have been beautiful. God may have meant her to be; I don’t know anything about that. I am only aware how Nature interfered. For when she was young—a child not more, I think, than six—she was struck by lightning, paralysed for a time, and, when she recovered, her eyes were at loggerheads. They looked every way but one.
But I like her little shrivelled face, nevertheless. It is crafty, perhaps. She looks as if she counts every apple on the trees in her old garden. Why shouldn’t she? She has a poor opinion of men. Besides, the apples at Beech House Farm—where her father lived and his father before him—those apples are part of the slender income by which she manages to cling to the old home. Who could blame her for counting them? I don’t even blame her for having the cunning look of it in her eyes.
No—I suppose, though I do like her face, it is because I haven’t got to love it. Possibly that is why she has so poor an opinion of men. Some man found that he could not love her face and broke his faith with her. At least, I thought that then. Some heartless wretch has jilted her, I thought—taught her to love, and then caught sight of a prettier pair of eyes. I must admit he need not have been on the lookout for them.
“But,” said I presently, when these ideas had passed away, “don’t you admit men have their uses?”
“None!” she said emphatically.
“Then why,” I asked, “do you hang up that old top hat of your father’s on a peg in the kitchen, so that the first tramp, as you open the door to him, may see it?”
“So that he’ll think I’ve got a man in the house, I suppose,” she replied.