The door was suddenly flung open, and a boy came in and flung a sovereign on the counter.
"Could you oblige Mr. Bunting with change, please, miss?" he asked briskly.
That was all. There was no condescension in his tone. There was no impudence in his manner. He did not ask if we wanted our rights now, or if we would sooner wait till we got them. He did not say he had no wish to see women sitting in his Parliament. He just stood there, as shopman to shopman, waiting to effect a trade transaction that raised us, once and for all, beyond the level of amateurs.
Nothing approaching a sovereign's worth of change was in the chocolate-box hopefully described by us as the till; but our militant member, now as ever, knew how to rise to a great occasion. She looked up from the column of figures she had hastily pretended to be adding up when the shop bell tinkled, seemed to take in the boy's request with difficulty, called "Forward, dear, please!" in a languid tone up the spiral staircase, then returned to the column of figures. No lady of business experience in any shop or any post office could have been more exasperatingly irrelevant.
The rest of us looked fearfully at the boy in front of the counter. He was kicking his heels together and whistling tunelessly. Her procedure had, indeed, not erred in a single detail; and he saw nothing aggressive in her behaviour. Henceforth we knew we could count on being treated in the trade as equals.
[XI]
The Person who cannot Escape
The lady of the manor seemed gently amused when I criticized the architecture of the cottage in which I had taken rooms, on the farther side of the village.
"It is not picturesque, like those that belong to us," she admitted; "and I always think it was a little unwise of Horace to let that piece of land for building purposes without having the plans submitted to us first. Still, the land was no good for anything else, not even for allotments; and if we had stipulated for gables and things of that sort we might have it still on our hands, a prey to taxation."