‘Oh, I hope she is enjoying herself.’
‘Oh, very much, thank you. She’s very much sought after—sixpence you will want, I think—and they visit a good deal amongst the neighbours.’
‘Yes? And Mr. Camm? I hope you have good accounts of him?’
‘I really haven’t heard anything about him lately,’ said Mrs. Dixon, in an indescribable tone, as she poised the fingers of both hands on the counter and looked out of the window, as if she thought the interview had better come to an end.
‘Ah, I suppose Ada will be the person to get news of him. I was so glad to hear he had done so well, and got such an excellent situation at Leeds. Ada will like to live near a large town like that, I should think.’
‘Well, yes—perhaps. Perhaps not,’ said Mrs. Dixon, with a glacial reserve, and then with crushing mysteriousness—‘There’s no saying where Ada may end, or what she’s born to. She is not a common girl, by any means.’
‘I hope she will end in marrying Mr. Camm, and making him a very good wife. He is a first-rate young man, and deserves to be made happy,’ said Eleanor, nettled by the supercilious tone in which Roger’s future mother-in-law spoke of him.
‘Oh, he’s a very worthy young man, I don’t doubt,’ came the rejoinder; ‘a little rough, and wanting in polish—hardly the genteel manners one could desire.’
‘No, not very genteel, certainly,’ said Eleanor, hurrying a little in her desire to be able to laugh at leisure over the complaint that Roger Camm’s manners were not ‘genteel.’ Indeed, they were not. If gentility were the desideratum, they were deplorably wanting, and likely to remain so.
Going up the street she suddenly met Michael Langstroth, and could not help telling him the joke, her eyes dancing as she spoke.