What
cares she? She has caught us, and chained us to her work. She is
our universal mother-in-law. She has done the match-making; for the
rest, she leaves it to ourselves. We can love or we can fight; it
is all one to her, confound her.
I wonder sometimes if good temper might not be taught. In business
we use no harsh language, say no unkind things to one another. The
shopkeeper, leaning across the counter, is all smiles and
affability, he might put up his shutters were he otherwise. The
commercial gent, no doubt, thinks the ponderous shopwalker an ass,
but refrains from telling him so. Hasty tempers are banished from
the City. Can we not see that it is just as much to our interest to
banish them from Tooting and Hampstead?
The young man who sat in the chair next to me, how carefully he
wrapped the cloak round the shoulders of the little milliner beside
him. And when she said she was tired of sitting still, how readily
he sprang from his chair to walk with her, though it was evident he
was very comfortable where he was. And she! She had laughed at his
jokes; they were not very clever jokes, they were not very new. She
had probably read them herself months before in her own particular
weekly journal.
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