This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
EVAN HARRINGTON
By George Meredith
BOOK 7.
XXXIX. IN THE DOMAIN OF TAILORDOM XL. IN WHICH THE COUNTESS STILL SCENTS GAME XLI. REVEALS AN ABOMINABLE PLOT OF THE BROTHERS COGGLESBY XLII. JULIANA XLIII. ROSE XLIV. CONTAINS A WARNING TO ALL CONSPIRATORS XLV. IN WHICH THE SHOP BECOMES THE CENTRE OF ATTRACTION XLVI. A LOVER'S PARTING XLVII. A YEAR LATER THE COUNTESS DE SALDAR DE SANCORVO TO HER SISTER CAROLINE
CHAPTER XXXIX
IN THE DOMAIN OF TAILORDOM
There was peace in Mr. Goren's shop. Badgered Ministers, bankrupt merchants, diplomatists with a headache—any of our modern grandees under difficulties, might have envied that peace over which Mr. Goren presided: and he was an enviable man. He loved his craft, he believed that he had not succeeded the millions of antecedent tailors in vain; and, excepting that trifling coquetry with shirt-fronts, viz., the red crosses, which a shrewd rival had very soon eclipsed by representing nymphs triangularly posed, he devoted himself to his business from morning to night; as rigid in demanding respect from those beneath him, as he was profuse in lavishing it on his patrons. His public boast was, that he owed no man a farthing; his secret comfort, that he possessed two thousand pounds in the Funds. But Mr. Goren did not stop here. Behind these external characteristics he nursed a passion. Evan was astonished and pleased to find in him an enthusiastic fern-collector. Not that Mr. Harrington shared the passion, but the sight of these brown roots spread out, ticketed, on the stained paper, after supper, when the shutters were up and the house defended from the hostile outer world; the old man poring over them, and naming this and that spot where, during his solitary Saturday afternoon and Sunday excursions, he had lighted on the rare samples exhibited this contrast of the quiet evening with the sordid day humanized Mr. Goren to him. He began to see a spirit in the rigid tradesman not so utterly dissimilar to his own, and he fancied that he, too, had a taste for ferns. Round Beckley how they abounded!
He told Mr. Goren so, and Mr. Goren said:
'Some day we'll jog down there together, as the saying goes.'