'Where is Mrs. Wood's?' Colin asked.
'At Dean Street, Marylebone.'
'Why, that's quite close to our place,' Colin cried. 'Are they big boxes? I could carry 'em, maybe.'
'No, you couldn't carry them, Colin. Why, what nonsense. It wouldn't be respectable.'
Colin laughed. 'I should have done it at Wootton, anyhow, Minna,' he answered; 'and a working stone-cutter needn't be ashamed of anything in the way of work, surely.'
'But a sculptor's got to keep up his position,' Minna put in firmly.
Colin smiled again. Already he had a nascent idea in his own head that even a sculptor could not bemean himself greatly by carrying a wooden box through the streets of London for a lady—he was getting to believe in the dignity of labour—but he didn't insist upon this point with Minna; for, young as he was, he had a notion even then that the gospel for men isn't always at the same time the gospel for women. Even a good woman would feel much less compunction against many serious crimes than against trundling a wheelbarrow full of clean clothes up Begent Street of an afternoon in the height of the season.
So Cohn was for calling a porter with a truck; but even that modified measure of conveyance did not wholly suit Minna's aristocratic fancy. 'Are they things cabs, Cohn?' she asked quietly.
'Those things are,' Cohn answered with a significant emphasis. Minna blushed a trifle.
'Oh, those things,' she repeated slowly; 'then I'll have one.' And in two minutes more, Cohn, for the first time in his life, found himself actually driving along the public streets in the inside of a hansom. Why, you imperious, extravagant little Minna, where on earth are you going to find money for such expenses as these in our toilsome, under-paid, workyday London?