Their supper was laid in a little parlour on one side of the private entrance, and when Medora descended, she found Mrs. Hayman turning up the lamp.
“You’ll be tired, my dear, I expect,” said the elder, “and Mr. Kellock also. Shall I send in bottled beer or draught?”
“We shan’t want nothing in that way. Yes, I will too—I’ll have a Bass, Mrs. Hayman; but he won’t—he’s teetotal. Was it my mother brought my things?”
“She did—her and Daisy Finch. And your mother’s coming over to see you to-morrow morning. I was to be sure and tell you.”
“I suppose it have made a bit of stir, Mrs. Hayman?”
“What have, my dear?”
“Me, running away with Mr. Kellock.”
“Not that I have heard of. There’s such a lot of running away now-a-days. Though, as a man said in the bar a few nights ago, there ain’t much need for most women to run. They can go their own pace, so long as it takes ’em away from their lawfuls. Take my own niece. She married a wheelwright, and ran away with a carpenter six months after. And when she did, far the happiest of them three people was the wheelwright. Yet the guilty pair, so to call ’em, thought he’d do dreadful things; they didn’t draw a breath in comfort till they’d got to Canada, and put the ocean between. Marriage, in fact, ain’t what it was. In my opinion it won’t stand the strain much longer. It was never built to endure against such facilities for getting about and seeing new faces as the people have now—let alone the education. These here life-long partnerships—however, no doubt you know all about it. I’m a very broad-minded woman myself, and never throw a stone, though I don’t live in a glass house, for me and my husband are two of the lucky ones. I’ve never wished for no change, and God help him if he’d shown any feeling of that sort.”
Medora little liked the assumption that her achievement was an affair of every day.
“Few have got the courage and self-respect to do it,” she said.