With which he went out, leaving Michael laughing to himself.
The latter had once again to turn out in the raw November air, to see some patients in the town. As he returned, he passed the shop of Mr. Dixon, the Bradstane stationer, and looking up, saw a bright light burning behind the red curtains of the windows on the second story. Distant sounds of music also came to his ears. He smiled and sighed, both at once; and in his mind there were running thoughts, almost identical with those which Roger Camm had thought of Michael’s own engagement, eight years ago, to Magdalen Wynter.
‘If she is the girl to make him happy, well and good. But I wish he had chosen differently. He talks about marrying into his own sphere—such bosh! Small shopkeepers are not his sphere, let him say what he likes. If Ada Dixon had been a squire’s daughter, I suppose he would have discovered that after all he was a clergyman’s son, and a gentleman, her social equal. Now it suits him better to call himself a working man, and say that like must wed like, to be happy. It is a pity; he might have had a career, only she drags him back.’
He called at Dr. Rowntree’s, and had half an hour’s chat with the old man; then back to his own house, his pipe, and a treatise on some new surgical experiments with which it behoved him to make acquaintance.
CHAPTER XVII
ROGER CAMM’S COURTING
Roger Camm, in the meantime, had carried himself, with his roll of music in his hand, to see his betrothed at her father’s house, and was having a less delightful time of it, perhaps, than Michael pictured to himself.
The Dixon ménage had in no way fallen off, either in substantial internal comfort or in outward vulgarity and pretentiousness. Mrs. Dixon was even more bent upon rising in the world than her husband: he still adhered to the legitimate means by which a man may get on, by steady attention to his business and judicious retail impositions, which, when counted up at the end of the year, generally amounted to a nice little wholesale sum. Mrs. Dixon had, however, advanced in breadth of view as years had passed. She held by the doctrine that children were bound to help their parents, and she looked to Ada to help them in pushing the family fortunes.
Mr. Dixon was what himself and his neighbours called a warm man, but he was cautious about bragging of his comfortableness and his competence. He looked the brag instead of speaking it. He had exalted views as to his own position and importance, but they were tempered by a strong mixture of the strictest and sternest common sense.
Ada had returned to them just before she was seventeen, nearly two years ago, a finished young lady, playing the piano, singing, drawing (from anything but nature), and with a smattering of execrable French. She had a thousand airs and graces, a fine contempt for her father’s business, and a meritorious sense of shame whenever it was mentioned in her hearing, and she was exceedingly and undeniably pretty.
There had been great discussions as to the part Ada was to take in the establishment when she left school. Mr. Dixon fell in with the wifely resolve that their child should never go behind the counter—he quite understood that she was neither designed nor finished for anything of the kind. But his transports in other respects fell short of those of his consort.