Grindley junior, not knowing what to say, put his arms round the little old man.
And in this way Tommy’s brilliant scheme fell through and came to naught. Instead, old Grindley visited once again the big house in Nevill’s Court, and remained long closeted with old Solomon in the office on the second floor. It was late in the evening when Solomon opened the door and called upstairs to Janet Helvetia to come down.
“I used to know you long ago,” said Hezekiah Grindley, rising. “You were quite a little girl then.”
Later, the troublesome Sauce disappeared entirely, cut out by newer flavours. Grindley junior studied the printing business. It almost seemed as if old Appleyard had been waiting but for this. Some six months later they found him dead in his counting-house. Grindley junior became the printer and publisher of Good Humour.
STORY THE FOURTH—Miss Ramsbotham gives her Services
To regard Miss Ramsbotham as a marriageable quantity would have occurred to few men. Endowed by Nature with every feminine quality calculated to inspire liking, she had, on the other hand, been disinherited of every attribute calculated to excite passion. An ugly woman has for some men an attraction; the proof is ever present to our eyes. Miss Ramsbotham was plain but pleasant looking. Large, healthy in mind and body, capable, self-reliant, and cheerful, blessed with a happy disposition together with a keen sense of humour, there was about her absolutely nothing for tenderness to lay hold of. An ideal wife, she was an impossible sweetheart. Every man was her friend. The suggestion that any man could be her lover she herself would have greeted with a clear, ringing laugh.
Not that she held love in despite; for such folly she was possessed of far too much sound sense. “To have somebody in love with you—somebody strong and good,” so she would confess to her few close intimates, a dreamy expression clouding for an instant her broad, sunny face, “why, it must be just lovely!” For Miss Ramsbotham was prone to American phraseology, and had even been at some pains, during a six months’ journey through the States (whither she had been commissioned by a conscientious trade journal seeking reliable information concerning the condition of female textile workers) to acquire a slight but decided American accent. It was her one affectation, but assumed, as one might feel certain, for a practical and legitimate object.
“You can have no conception,” she would explain, laughing, “what a help I find it. ‘I’m ‘Muriken’ is the ‘Civis Romanus sum’ of the modern woman’s world. It opens every door to us. If I ring the bell and say, ‘Oh, if you please, I have come to interview Mr. So-and-So for such-and-such a paper,’ the footman looks through me at the opposite side of the street, and tells me to wait in the hall while he inquires if Mr. So-and-So will see me or not. But if I say, ‘That’s my keerd, young man. You tell your master Miss Ramsbotham is waiting for him in the showroom, and will take it real kind if he’ll just bustle himself,’ the poor fellow walks backwards till he stumbles against the bottom stair, and my gentleman comes down with profuse apologies for having kept me waiting three minutes and a half.
“’And to be in love with someone,” she would continue, “someone great that one could look up to and honour and worship—someone that would fill one’s whole life, make it beautiful, make every day worth living, I think that would be better still. To work merely for one’s self, to think merely for one’s self, it is so much less interesting.”
Then, at some such point of the argument, Miss Ramsbotham would jump up from her chair and shake herself indignantly.