CHAPTER XI
When you live in a large community you feel it possible to give an enemy a private black eye and that there the matter ends—nobody’s business but yours and his—and it is only when you live in a little place that you realise the extraordinary fact that there are no private black eyes—every black eye affects the universe.
Of course every one knows this, but only through the microscope of narrow lives do you see the principle at work.
Which all means that Andy would not have met Elizabeth at Marshaven if the young man who was her aunt’s carpenter had not been obliged to abstain from attending upon particular widows; for Elizabeth would have been unable to find any excuse which would possibly hold water for coming into the little town on the day of the school-treat. And her own self-respect—the self-respect of a girl in such matters is a queer and chancy thing—would not permit her to come in without a decent excuse.
However, a carpenter happened to be rather urgently needed, and, as the young man’s father was laid up with bronchitis, and the young man himself had a black eye, Elizabeth volunteered to walk over to Marshaven, a distance of about two miles from her aunt’s house, which lay between Millsby and the sea.
“Take the pony-cart,” entreated the aunt.
But Elizabeth’s face assumed the expression which her family knew well, and she walked.
Meantime, Gaythorpe had awakened early to the sense of an outing, which is a vastly different thing from just going out—as different as moonshine from electric light.