Introduction to Sally

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

Mr. Soper being intelligent, though handicapped at the moment by not quite believing his eyes, thought he here perceived encouragement to untie the handkerchief. He put the basin on the floor at the young lady’s feet, and untied it. She gazed at the lovely contents, at potatoes showing their sleek sides through the brimming gravy, at little ends of slender cutlets, at glimpses of bright carrots, at pearly-shouldered onions gleaming from luscious depths, with such evident longing that he was emboldened to ask her if she wouldn’t oblige him by tasting it, and telling him her opinion of it as a stew.

‘There’s stews and stews, you know, Miss,’ he said, hastily arranging it on an empty packing-case convenient for her, ‘but my old woman’s who looks after me is ’ard to beat——’

And he ran into the little shed he had come out of, and after a minute’s rummaging brought her a spoon and plate. His own spoon was in his pocket. He didn’t use a plate.

Sally tasted; and, having tasted, went on tasting. Soon there was danger that Mr. Soper’s dinner would be so much tasted that there wouldn’t be any left, but he cared nothing for that. If he had had a hundred stews, and he starving, they should all have been the young lady’s.

Sally tried not to taste too much, but she was so hungry, and the stew was so lovely. Besides, the young man kept urging her to go on. He was more like a friend than any one she had yet met. That he should never take his eyes off her didn’t disturb her in the least, for she had been used to that all her life; and his language was her language, and he didn’t make her feel nervous, and she knew instinctively that she could do nothing wrong in his sight, and she talked more to him during the half hour they ate the stew together—for she presently insisted on his getting another plate and joining in—than she had talked to Jocelyn the whole time they had known each other; talked more to him, indeed, than she had ever talked to anybody, except, when she was little, to those girl friends who had later fallen away.

How surprising, how delightful, the ease with which she said things to Mr. Soper, and the things that came into her head to say! Quite clever, she was; quite sharp, and quick at the take-up. And laugh—why, the young fellow made her laugh so that she could hardly keep from choking. Not in all her life had she laughed as Mr. Soper made her laugh. Bright, he was, and no mistake. While as for Mr. Soper himself, who could be much, much brighter, he was fortunately kept damped down to his simpler jokes by the effect the strange young lady’s loveliness had on him; so that he who in Truro was known as the life of his set, as the boldest of its wits as well as the most daring of its ladies’ men, was as mild and timid in his preliminary frisks with Sally as a lately born lamb exploring, for the first time, the beautiful strange world it had suddenly discovered.

§

Jocelyn found them there, the empty basin on the floor between them, and, sticking up in it, two spoons.

‘My ’usband,’ introduced Sally, starting a little, for she had forgotten Jocelyn; and Mr. Soper had what he afterwards described as the turn of his life.

She with a husband? She who was hardly old enough, if you asked him, to have a father even? Got a husband all the time, and eaten his stew. He didn’t grudge her the stew, but he did think she ought to have told him she had a husband. Fancy eating his stew, and knowing she had a husband the whole time. It seemed to make it unfair. It seemed to make it somehow false pretences. And one of these blinking gentlemen, too; one of your haw-haw chaps with the brains of a rabbit, thought Mr. Soper, looking Jocelyn up and down, who took no notice of him whatever. See that written all over him, thought Mr. Soper, seeking comfort in derision,—a silly fool who couldn’t even mend his own horn. Wicked, he called it, wicked, to thieve this girl away from her own lot, filch her, before she knew what she was about, from her natural mates, go-ahead chaps like, for instance, himself, when there were thousands of female rabbits in his own class who would have fitted him like so many blooming gloves.