A cold air came off the sea, and she shivered. Looking round, she saw that the sun had just dipped behind the long white cornice of the stately houses. The wide lawn was in shadow.
She felt cold, and shivered several times as she walked home to the noisy hotel.
XIII
They had been married nearly three months, and each month seemed longer to her than any year of her previous existence.
Many changes were visible at the shop. Indeed, from the back wall of the carters' yard to the sign-board over the front doors, nothing was quite as it used to be. The big white board, which told the world that the business "Established 1813" now belonged to Thompson & Marsden, was a makeshift affair; but the new partner had ordered a gigantic and artistic fascia, and this, he said, would be a real ornament to High Street.
He promised soon to inaugurate new departments, to introduce improvements in the old ones, to revolutionize old-fashioned time-wasting methods of book-keeping and all other office work; but so far he had only achieved something very like chaos.
"Don't fuss," he used to say. "I'll soon get to work; but I can't attend to it for the moment."
Thus the little realm behind the glass had been turned upside down and not yet replaced upon its feet again. The rooms were blocked with the opened and unopened packing-cases that contained the materials for Mr. Marsden's clever arrangement—innumerable desks and cabinets, immense index cupboards, racks and sideless stands, by the use of which weapons such antiquated devices as letter-presses, copying-machines, and pigeon-holes would be abolished. Every shred of paper would be filed flat; thousands of letters would lie in the space hitherto occupied by half a dozen; each correspondent would be allotted a file to himself, letter and answer together; and this novel system would deprive clerks of the power of making mistakes; order would reign; confusion would be impossible. But at present, with the two systems inextricably mixed, the new system half started and the old system half discarded, confusion was not only possible but unavoidable.