She bought a packet of envelopes for fourpence. Charles turned away to look at some of the gaudily-bound Kebles, Byrons, and Scotts so dear to the middle-class heart, and before he could turn again she had bought a little prayer-book with a cross on it for a shilling. The shopman was besetting her with a new invention in birthday cards when Charles broke the spell by touching her elbow with the head of his walking stick.
"Don't you think," said he when they were safely in the street, "it is a mistake buying prayer-books, these shop-keepers are such awful swindlers?"
"I bought it for Susannah," explained Fanny. "It's a little present for her after the way James has gone on. Look at this dear monkey."
A barrel organ of the old type was playing by the pavement, making a sound as if an old man gone idiotic were humming a tune to himself. A villainous-looking monkey on the organ-top, held out his hand when it saw Fanny approaching. It knew the world evidently, or at least physiognomy, which is almost the same thing.
"He takes it just like a man," she cried, as the creature grabbed one of her pennies and then nearly broke its chain trying to get at her to tear the rose from her hat. "Look, it knows the people who are fond of it; it is just like a child."
Charles tore her from the monkey, only for a milliner's shop to suck her in.
"I must run in here for a moment, it's only about a corset I ordered; I won't be three minutes."
He waited ten, thinking how strange it was that this girl saw something attractive in nearly everything—strange cats, monkeys, and even old Hancock.
At the end of twenty minutes' walking up and down, he approached the milliner's window and peeped into the shop.
Fanny was conversing with a tall woman, whose frizzled black hair lent her somehow the appearance of a Frenchwoman.