“Oh, Tom! Lik a grand couple! We mun’t go chucking the money away.”
“We woan’t chuck it all away, but we’ll chuck a fair-sized bit. I doan’t git much chance of spending out there.”
She looked at him tenderly.
“To think as I ever thought you wur slower nor me!”
“I wur a gurt owl,” said Tom. “Lord! if I’d a-gone West, and never so much as kissed you....”
“But you did kiss me, dear—in the shop, the evenun afore you went away.”
“Twur only your hand, and I wur all quaaking like a calf.”
Thyrza sighed.
“It wur a lovely kiss.”
The Beatups were naturally indignant at Tom’s decision. To them it savoured of undue haste, if not of indecency. Courtships in Sunday Street usually lasted from two to ten years. Indeed, Maudie Speldrum had been wooed for fifteen years before she took matters into her own hands and proposed to Bert Pix. Tom had not been engaged to Thyrza six months. What did they want to get married for? And what was Tom but a lad?—a mere child in his mother’s eyes—a calf that Mrs. Honey was leading to market, all ignorant (as she could not be) of what lay ahead. In Sunday Street, marriage was the end—the end of love, the end of youth—and mixed with Mrs. Beatup’s jealousy of the other woman and suspicion of her motives, was the desire to keep her son a little longer in the frisky meadows of his boyhood before he was led to those lean pastures she knew so well.