'It does your heart credit,' said Mrs. Tomkin-Jones, who was really a good and well-meaning woman.
Then Jesse burst forth: 'Let me kiss you. Now I know that I shall love you. If mamma says a word against her, I will stamp on her corns, and she has soft ones, too!'
CHAPTER XXXIII
IN THE SQUARE
The day was pleasant, the sun shone, and the spring buds were swelling. In Bath vegetation is in advance of that elsewhere. The crocus was passing and the daffodil was coming on.
Clouds, mountainous, snowy, were piled up in the blue sky.
The sun was warm, in the garden of the square it was possible to sit out and enjoy it. The hills about Bath, and the houses that encompassed the square, cut off the cold wind.
Mrs. Tomkin-Jones, because numbered as belonging to the square, possessed a key that admitted within the rails into the precinct where grew seringa and snowballs, was wintry grass, and where accumulated scraps of paper, the waifs of the street. By means of the key Winefred had admitted herself to the garden, and was seated on a bench enjoying the sun, occupied with thoughts the reverse of sunny.
The girl was not reconciled to her surroundings. She had begun to doubt her adaptability to them; she was low-spirited, and perplexed as to her course. At moments she felt that she would have been less uncomfortable at Axmouth. The gibes of the village girls would have been less intolerable than the patronage of Mrs. Tomkin-Jones. The envy of the rustics was a recognition of superiority, and consequently flattering to her pride, whereas the condescension of the doctor's widow impressed on her a sense of inferiority, and that an inferiority on an uncertain stage. At Axmouth she at all events felt the ground under her feet. Here, at Bath, she did not touch ground at all. She was like one of those glass imps in a water bottle that goes to the bottom at a touch on the elastic cover of the vessel, and the thumb of Mrs. T.-J. was much employed in depressing her.