The next day cards were left upon Mr. H. Stanwell and his wife, and it was universally admitted that they formed quite a congenial addition to Mailing-ham Society. He was a pleasant man and she was a charming woman. They came to Mallingham with a clean bill of health. Neither of them had done anything in the world, and the only time their names had appeared in the newspapers was when they had been married. They were nonentities to their finger-tips, and they soon took a high place among the nonentities of Mallingham.
Mr. Stanwell sorrowfully admits that more than once he has been asked in hotels in France and Italy if he was any relation to Herbert Stanwell, the great author. It is very annoying, he says, but he hopes to live it down. If he continues to live at Mallingham, he may be assured that his hopes run every chance of being realised.
It is greatly to be feared that the leading “note” of Mallingham is not literature. It is Thurswell that occasionally lays claim to be a great reading centre. It was in the most friendly spirit of honest patronage that a lady addressed a letter to George Eliot, commending some of the characters in The Mill on the Floss, but regretting that the story had not a happy ending.
“But it never reached him,” she said. “I had sent it under cover to the publishers, but they returned it to me, with a scrawl across it, evidently done by a clerk, saying, 'Present address of George Eliot not known, so, after all my trouble, it never reached him.”
Having mentioned The Mill on the Floss, I feel bound to say that neither in Thurswell nor Mallingham did the sporting innkeeper live who, on seeing a cheap edition of the book advertised, at once sent for it and read the greater part of it before he found out that he had been too hasty in taking for granted that it was written round a prizefight. A “mill” meant to him primarily such an incident, and his excursions into the magic realms of literature had practically been confined to the spirited accounts given incertain weekly papers of such encounters. A mill as an industrial building conveyed quite a secondary idea to him. He admitted to a friend of mine who found the book in the bar parlour, and wondered how it got he had been “had” over it, and his faith in the accuracy of literary advertisements got a severe jar. How was he to tell, he asked, that the chap meant another sort of mill?
How, indeed?