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Updated: May 10, 2025
Ollerenshaw," she said, "everybody seems to be choosing the garden. Shall we go there? This way." She led him down the side-hall. "By the bye," she murmured, with a smile, "I think our plan is succeeding." And, without warning him, she sat down in the seat, and of course he joined her, and she put her head close to his, evidently in a confidential mood.
She had continued to squeeze it. She, in her rich raiment, with her fine ways, and her correct accent, had squeezed the hand of Jimmy Ollerenshaw, with his hard old clothes and his Turkish cap, his simple barbarisms, his lack of style, and his uncompromising dialect! Why? Because he was rich? No. Because he was a man, because he was the best man in Bursley, when you came down to essentials.
Further, except at grave-sides, James Ollerenshaw had never in his life raised his hat. Hat-raising formed no part of his code of manners. In his soul he looked upon hat-raising as affected. He believed that all people who raised hats did so from a snobbish desire to put on airs. Hat-raising was rather like saying "please," only worse.
He rather liked being a card. But within his own heart the triumph and glory of James Ollerenshaw were less splendid than outside it. Helen, apparently ashamed of having wept into his waistcoat, kept him off with a kind of a rod of stiff politeness. He could not get near her, and for at least two reasons he was anxious to get near her.
And he liked her because she was so exquisitely fresh and candid, so elegant, so violent and complete a contrast to James Ollerenshaw; so absurdly sagacious and sure of herself, and perhaps because of a curve in her cheek, and a mysterious suggestion of eternal enigma in her large and liquid eye.
She had thought: "It's a funny thing if I can't bring him to his knees with a tasty supper just to make it clear to him what he'll lose if he loses me." James Ollerenshaw had no sleep that night. And Helen had but little. He came downstairs early, as he had done after a previous sleepless night also caused by Helen.
"You might praise Emanuel to her urge her on." She fixed him with her eye. Sensible? She was prodigious. She was the serpent of serpents. He took her gaze twinkling. "Ay!" he said. "I might. But if I'm to urge her on, why didna' ye ask her to your house like, and chuck 'em at each other?" She nodded several times, impressed by this argument. "You are quite right, Mr. Ollerenshaw," she admitted.
Approaching, step by dainty and precise step, the seat invested by Mr. James Ollerenshaw, she arrived at the point whence she could distinguish the features of her forestaller; she was somewhat short-sighted. She gave no outward sign of fear, irresolution, cowardice.
I pretend to be, lest Lilian should imagine I'm jealous." It was at this point that the voice of James Ollerenshaw announced a young man. The remainder of that afternoon was like a bewildering dream to James Ollerenshaw. His front room seemed to be crowded with a multitude of peacocks, that would have been more at home under the sun of Mrs. Prockter's lawns up at Hillport.
"That's what happened, missis," he said, grimly. She had punctuated his recital by several exclamations, and when he had finished she gave rein to her sentiments. "My dear Mr. Ollerenshaw," she said, in the kindest manner conceivable, "how I sympathise with you! How I wish I could help you!" Her sympathy was a genuine comfort to him.
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