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He found Mrs. Prockter slowly and cautiously ascending the stairway. If he was at the summit of Mont Blanc she had already reached Les Grands Mulets. "What is it?" she asked, pausing, and looking up at him with an appealing gesture. "What's what?" "Why have you been so long?" It was as if she implied that these minutes without him were an eternity of ennui. He grew more and more conceited.
He felt that he preferred stout women to thin; and that, without being aware of it, he had always preferred stout women to thin. It was a question of taste. He certainly preferred Mrs. Prockter to Sarah Swetnam. Mrs. Prockter's smile was the smile of a benevolently cynical creature whose studies in human nature had reached the advanced stage.
"But why should you be glad? That's what I want to know." James could not sagaciously reply to this query. He merely scratched his head, tilting one of his Turkish caps to that end. "The fact is," she cried, with a grammatical carelessness which was shocking in a woman who had professed to teach everything, "every one has got their knives into Emanuel Prockter.
But he vividly remembered what Helen had said about caps. Naturally, he had to let her in. He held the candle in his left hand, as he opened the door with his right, and the tassel of his cap was over his eye. "You'll think I'm in the habit of calling on you at night," said Mrs. Prockter, as she slid through the narrow space which James allotted to her, and she laughed again.
And her smile changed, too became a good smile, a smile on which a man might depend. His heart went out to her, and he contemplated the smile in a pleased, beatific silence. Just then the candle a treacherous thing flamed up and went out. "Oh!" cried Mrs. Prockter. And James had not a match. He never smoked.
Prockter and her stepson, Emanuel Prockter, up Duck Bank as James and Helen were passing down Duck Bank. Mrs. You could not climb higher than Mrs. Prockter. She lived at Hillport, and even in that haughty suburb there was none who dared palter with an invitation from Mrs. Prockter. She was stout and deliberate.
They mounted the stairs. "Will you give me your arm, Mr. Ollerenshaw?" To such gifts he was not used. Already he had given twenty-six pounds that day. The spectacle of Jimmy ascending the state staircase of Wilbraham Hall with all the abounding figure of Mrs. Prockter on his arm would have drawn crowds had it been offered to the public at sixpence a head.
Prockter? It wasn't my voice that cracked." The minx! There was a half-hearted attempt at the maintenance of the proprieties, and then Wilbraham Hall rang with the laughter of a joke which the next day had become the common precious property of all the Five Towns. When the aged rector had restored his flock to a sense of decency Mr. Emanuel Prockter had vanished.
He was very pleased with himself, because, at the cost of his own respect, he had pleased Mrs. Prockter. "Well?" murmured Helen, in response, tapping on the edge of the pavement the very same sunshade in whose company James had first made her acquaintance. She seemed nervous, hesitating, apprehensive. "What about that house as ye've so kindly chosen for me?" he asked, genially.
As he faced about at the half-landing, he saw Helen, in an orange-tinted peignoir, and her hair all down her back, holding a candle. She beckoned to him. He ascended to her. "Who's there?" she inquired, coldly. "Mrs. Prockter," he murmured. "And are you sitting together in the dark?" she inquired, coldly. The story that the candle had expired seemed feeble in the extreme.
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