So I was left alone again with forgotten Fanny, and that night I dreamed of her. Nothing to be seen but black boiling waves flinging their yeasty, curdling crests into the clouds, and every crest the face of my ferrety "herrand-boy." And afloat in the midst of the welter beneath, a beloved shape whiter than the foam, with shut eyes, under the gigantic stoop of the water. Who hangs these tragic veils in the sleeping mind? Who was this I that looked out on them? I awoke, shuddering, breathed a blessing—disjointed, nameless; turned over, and soon was once more asleep.
My day's experiences in the High Street had added at least twenty-four hours to my life. So much a woman of the world was I becoming that when, after Pollie's departure, a knock announced Mr Crimble, I greeted him with a countenance guileless and self-possessed. With spectacles fixed on me, he stood nervously twitching a small bunch of snowdrops which he assured me were the first of the New Year. I thanked him, remarked that our Lyndsey snowdrops were shorter in the stalk than these, and had he noticed the pale green hieroglyphs on the petals?
"In the white, dead nettle you have to look underneath for them: tiny black oblongs; you can't think how secret it looks!"
But Mr Crimble had not come to botanize. After answering my inquiry after the health of Mrs Hubbins, he suddenly sat down and announced that the object of his visit was to cast himself on my generosity. The proposal made me uncomfortable, but my timid attempt to return to Mrs Hubbins was unavailing.
"I speak," he said, "of yesterday's atrocity. There is no other word for it, and inasmuch as it occurred within two hundred yards of my own church, indeed of my mother's house, I cannot disclaim all responsibility for it."
Nor could I. But I wished very heartily that he had not come to talk about his share. "Oh," said I, as airily as I could, "you mean, Mr Crimble, my little experience in the High Street. That was nothing. My attention was so much taken up with other things that I did not get even so much as a glimpse of St Peter's. So you see——"
"You are kindness itself," he interrupted, with a rapid insertion of his forefinger between his neck and his clerical collar, "but the fact is," and he cast a glance at me as if with the whites of his eyes, "the fact is, I was myself a scandalized witness of the occurrence. Believe me, it cannot have hurt your sensitive feelings more than—than it hurt mine."
"But honestly, Mr Crimble," I replied, glancing rather helplessly round the room, "it didn't hurt my feelings at all. You don't feel much, you know, when you are angry. It was just as I should have foreseen. It is important to know where we are, isn't it; and where other people are? And boys will be boys, as Mrs Bowater says, and particularly, I suppose, errand boys. What else could I expect? It has just taught me a very useful lesson—even though I didn't much enjoy learning it. If I am ever to get used to the world (and that is a kind of duty, Mr Crimble, isn't it?), the world must get used to me. Perhaps if we all knew each other's insides—our thoughts and feelings, I mean—everybody would be as peculiar there—inside, you know—as I am, outside. I'm afraid this is not making myself very clear."
And only a few weeks ago I had been bombarding Dr Phelps with precisely the opposite argument. That, I suppose, is what is meant by being "deceitful on the weights."