“It has been made,” returned Mrs. Rymer, disregarding the offered chair, and standing to hold her boots, one after the other, to the fire. “Margaret can’t go, Mr. Sale; you know it.”
“But I wish her to go, and she wishes it.”
“It’s a puzzle to me what on earth you can see in her,” cried Mrs. Rymer, flinging her grey muff on the table, and untying her black bonnet-strings to tilt back the bonnet. “Margaret won’t have any money. Not a penny piece.”
“I am not thinking about money,” replied the curate; who somehow could never keep his temper long in the presence of this strong-minded Amazon. “It is Margaret that I want; not money.”
“And it’s Margaret, then, that you can’t have,” she retorted. “Who is to keep the shop on if she leaves it?—it can’t go to rack and ruin.”
“I see you serving in it yourself sometimes.”
“I can serve the stationery—and the pickles and fish sauce—and the pearl barley,” contended she, “but not the drugs. I don’t meddle with them. When a prescription comes in to be made up, if I attempted to do it I might put opium for senna, and poison people. I have not learnt Latin, as Margaret has.”
“But, Mrs. Rymer——”
“Now we’ll just drop the subject, sir, if it’s all the same to you,” loudly put in Mrs. Rymer. “I have told you before that Margaret must stay where she is, and keep the business together for me and her brother. No need to repeat it fifty times over.”