Then her mother, to get the young man out of her head, began to read her those unkind books about sinners, and tried in that manner to show her the error of her ways.
The treatment didn’t answer, for the young lady got slowly worse, until she came to our place, and then you know what happened.
“Oh, Harry,” I said, after the doctor had told me the story; “isn’t it dreadful? Fancy that sweet young lady dying of a broken heart, and at the ‘Stretford Arms,’ too!”
It quite upset me, and I was so miserable that I began to feel ill myself.
Harry was grieved too; but men don’t show grief the same way we do. Harry swore. He said Mrs. Elmore was a wicked old woman, and she ought to be ashamed of herself. What did it matter how a gentleman earned his living, if he earned it honestly, and as a gentleman should?
Mr. Wilkins, who got hold of the story—I never knew anything to go on in our house that that little man didn’t get hold of—must, of course, take a different view of the matter. It was just his contrariness.
He said that, after all, perhaps the mother wasn’t so much to blame. He knew the time when actors weren’t thought much of—in fact, in the history of our parish there was a record of actors having been put in the stocks; and in the eyes of the law, not so very long ago, they were rogues and vagabonds, and the parish beadle could order them off, and do all manner of things to them.
I said, “If it came to what was done once, people had their noses cut off for speaking their opinions.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Wilkins, “that hasn’t gone out yet. I know a place where a man has his nose taken off still, if he ventures to have an opinion of his own.”
And then the horrid little man looked straight at me, and nodded his head and said, “Ahem!”