"Sue, dear, it's not surprisin' that I surprise you, because, as I told you before, I surprise myself. I lie awake nights wondering at the ideas that come into my head. I suppose the old man was such an example——"
"An example, Joe?"
"Of how not to do things! Lawsy, what a wriggler, to be sure, twisting and turning in the dark, and disliking the light. Wouldn't clean our windows, because he didn't want our customers to see the fakes too plainly. We just pigged it. You know that? Yes. I had to make a flannel shirt last a fortnight. Same way with food. Cheap meat, badly cooked. Stunted my growth, it did, but not my mind. I used to spend my time thinking what I'd do when I got out of Melchester."
"Out of Melchester?"
Susan and her mother were in and of the ancient town. In these days of cheap excursions and motor-cars it is not easy to project the mind back to the time when the middle classes rarely stirred from home. To be in Melchester, according to Susan Biddlecombe, was a pleasure; to be of it, a privilege. Melchester had imposed upon her its inexorable conventions, the more inexorable because they were unformulated, exuding from every pore of the body corporate. Chief amongst them perhaps was veneration for the Bishop, who ruled his diocese with doctrinal severity tempered by gifts of port wine and tea and beef. Nonconformity was ill at ease and slightly out of elbows beneath the shadow of the most beautiful spire in England. The only Radical of importance in the town was Pinker, the rich grocer. And when the Marquess of Mel said to him, chaffingly, "Ah, Pinker, why don't you belong to us?" the honest fellow replied, "It's this way, my lord. The Conservative gentry deal with me because I know my business. The Radicals buy from me because I'm a Radical. They'd sooner deal with the Stores than with a Tory grocer."
Quinney continued:
"I have my eye on London, Paris, and New York."
"Mercy me!"
"Meanwhile, Melchester is good enough. But our house must be a show place—see?"
Susan tried to see, but blinked.