"Dear me! I don't believe you've been listening to a word I've been saying. Well, go your own gate, as the old woman said to the cow that would burst through the hedge and tumbled into the chalk-pit and broke its leg. What you going to do with that letter?"
"I will read it in the train."
CHAPTER V THE AMBASSADOR
It never rains but it pours. It was pouring just now with Leavesley.
The morning after the excursion to Epping Forest he had written a long letter to Fanny: a business-like letter, explanatory of his prospects in life.
He had exhibited in this year's Academy; he had exhibited in the New gallery—more, he had sold the Academy picture for forty pounds. He had a hundred a year of his own, which, as he sagaciously pointed out, was "something." If Fanny would only wait a year, give him something to hope for, something to live for, something to work for. Three pages of business-like statements ending with a fourth page of raving declarations of love. The letter of a lunatic, as all love-letters more or less are.
He had posted this and waited for a reply, but none had come. He little knew that his letter and a bill for potatoes were behind a plate on the kitchen dresser at "The Laurels," stuffed there by Susannah in a fit of abstraction, also the outcome of the troubles of love.
On top of this all sorts of minor worries fell upon him. Mark Moses and Sonenshine, stimulated by the two pounds ten paid on account, were bombarding him with requests for more. A colour-man was also active and troublesome, and a bootmaker lived on the stairs.
Belinda, vice-president of the institution during Mrs Tugwell's sojourn at Margate, was "cutting up shines," cooking disgracefully, not cleaning boots, giving "lip" when remonstrated with, and otherwise revelling in her little brief authority. A man who had all but commissioned a portrait of a bull-dog sent word to say that the sittings couldn't take place as the dog was dead.