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Updated: June 12, 2025
He was, perhaps, quick to perceive to-day that a mightier than the Archdeacon was here; or it may have been that he was well aware of what had been happening in Polchester during the last weeks, and was even informed of the incidents of the last three days.
There in the middle of the High Street, with every one about, to do such a thing! The disgrace of it! Why, now, they could never stay in Polchester.... This was worse than everything that had gone before. How they would all talk, Canon Ronder and all of them, and how pleased they would be! At that she clenched her hands and drew herself up as though she were defying the whole of Polchester.
This was definitely a meeting of Conspirators, and all of those engaged in it, with one exception, knew that that was so. Bentinck-Major knew it, and Foster and Ryle and Rogers. The exception was Martin, a young Minor Canon, who had the living of St. Joseph's-in-the-Fields, a slum parish in the lower part of the town. Martin had been invited because he was the best clergyman in Polchester.
I remember how, years ago in Polchester, when I could not have been more than six years old, I myself was haunted with exactly that same mixture of pleasure and horror by the figure of a hunch-backed pedlar who used to come to our town. Many years after I heard that he had been hung for the murder of some wretched woman who had accompanied him on some of his journeys.
In such a mood he loved every one, would pat children on the back, help old men along the road, listen to the long winnings of the reluctant poor. Utterly genuine he was; he meant every word that he spoke and every smile that he bestowed. Now, early in May and in Polchester he was in such a mood.
Nevertheless, entering his own home he was instantly bored. He found there, having tea with his aunt and sitting beneath the Hermes, so that the contrast made her doubly ridiculous, Julia Preston. Julia Preston was to him the most boring woman in Polchester. To herself she was the most important.
He had by her two children, a boy, Falcon, now twenty-one years of age, and a girl, Joan, just eighteen. Brandon therefore was safe from the feminine Polchester world; our town is famous among Cathedral cities for the morality of its upper classes. It would not have been possible during all these years for Brandon to have remained unconscious of the remarkable splendour of his good looks.
Polchester could not have appeared to any casual observer a luxurious town, but it had for Ronder exactly that combination of beauty and mystery that obtained for him his sensation. He did not analyse it as yet further than that he knew that those two things were there; he might investigate them at his leisure.
Many visitors have been known to declare that Seatown was "too sweet for anything," and that "it would be really wicked to knock down the ducks of cottages," but "the ducks of cottages" were the foulest and most insanitary dwelling-places in the south of England, and it has always been to me amazing that the Polchester Town Council allowed them to stand so long as they did.
Dick Whittington was coming, having perhaps heard that Polchester was a very jolly place. So might come any day Jack of the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Queen Victoria, and God. There were questions meanwhile that he would like to ask, but he was already a victim to that properly English fear of making a fool of himself, so he asked nothing.
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