Mr. Prentice took her hand; and, with a graceful old-world air of gallantry that perhaps the headachy lady at home had never seen, he raised it to his lips.
"I shall be what I have always been—your humble, admiring slave."
XXX
One of the oldest of her dreams had become partially true. She had bought that pretty country-house, and was living in it with Enid. Not the total fulfilment of the dream, because she had not retired from business. She was busier than ever.
Many things foretold by her had now come to pass. The military camp on the downs, with its twenty thousand armed men and half as many thousand followers, had brought increased prosperity to the neighbourhood; the carriage and locomotive works established by the railway company had added to the old town another town that by itself would have been big enough to sustain a mayor and corporation; builders could not build fast enough to house the rapidly swelling population; the well-filled suburbs stretched for two long miles in all directions from the ancient town boundaries; and by platform lecturers, by members of parliament, by writers of statistical reviews, the growth of Mallingbridge was cited as one of the most remarkable and gratifying achievements of the last decade.
In a word—the cant word—Mallingbridge had boomed. And right at the top of the boom, rolling on to glory, was Bence's.
The prodigious success of Bence's made the world gasp. Nothing could hinder it. People fancied that the rebuilding might prove a dangerous, if not a fatal crisis in its affairs; but the proprietress accomplished the colossal operation without even a temporary set-back. She moved Bence's bodily across the road, squashed it into the confines of old Thompson's, and left it there for eighteen months while the new Bence palace was being erected. The magnificence of these modern up-to-date premises surpassed belief—facade of pure white stone; gigantic caryatids, bearing on their heads the projected ledge of the second floor, and holding in their hands the sculptured brackets of the monstrous arc lamps; fluted columns from the second floor to the fourth; and above the deep cornice, just visible from the street, the cupola on top of the vast dome that was the crowning splendour of the whole.
Then directly the shop had been moved back into this ornate frame, down went the old red-brick block of Thompson's; and on the site still another palace for Bence began to rise. It seemed no less magnificent than the other; and it was finished off—by way of balance to the dome—with a stupendous clock-tower. The local press, in a series of articles describing this useful monument, said that the four-faced time-piece was an exact replica of Big Ben at Westminster; the base of the numeral twelve was one hundred and thirty-two feet above the pavement; the small hand was as long as a short man, and the long hand was longer than an excessively tall man;—and so on. The author of the articles also stated that the architectural effect of Bence on both sides of the street was very similar to the coup d'œil offered by the dome and tower of the cathedral at Florence.