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Updated: June 15, 2025


Nothing was left now of the diminutive distinction that had caused her to be once adored in Queningford. Susie was young at two-and-thirty, and Aggie, not three years older, was middle-aged. Not that there were many wrinkles on Aggie's face. Only a deep, crescent line on each side of a mouth that looked as if it had been strained tight with many tortures.

Meanwhile he spent all his holidays at Queningford, and Aggie had been twice to town. They saw so little of each other that every meeting was a divine event, a spiritual adventure. If each was not exactly an undiscovered country to the other, there was always some territory left over from last time, endlessly alluring to the pilgrim lover.

Miss Purcell of the Laurels was by common consent the prettiest, the best-dressed, and the best-mannered of them all. To be sure, she could only be judged by Queningford standards; and, as the railway nearest to Queningford is a terminus that leaves the small gray town stranded on the borders of the unknown, Queningford standards are not progressive.

Aggie folded up a child's frock with great deliberation, and pressed it, gently but firmly, into the portmanteau. "I must go," she said, gravely. "Arthur wants me." Mrs. Purcell was looking on with unfeigned grief at her daughter's preparations for departure. Aggie had gone down to Queningford, not for a flying visit, but to spend the greater part of the autumn.

For Arthur called first thing before breakfast to bring her the Browning, and first thing after breakfast to go with her to church, and first thing after dinner to take her for a walk. They went into the low-lying Queningford fields beside the river. They took the Browning with them; Arthur carried it under his arm.

Aggie left the sweet gardens, the white roads and green fields of Queningford, to live in a side street in Camden Town, in a creaking little villa built of sulphurous yellow brick furred with soot. They had come back from their brilliant fortnight on the south coast, and were standing together in the atrocious bow-window of their little sitting room looking out on the street.

Neither are they imitative; for imitation implies a certain nearness, and between the young ladies of Queningford and the daughters of the county there is an immeasurable void. The absence of any effective rivalry made courtship a rather tame and uninteresting affair to Miss Purcell.

On the Monday, very early in the morning, the young clerk would leave Queningford for town. By Friday his manner had become, as Susie Purcell expressed it, "so marked" that the most inexperienced young lady could have suffered no doubt as to the nature of his affections. All Friday she had been bothering Susie. Did Susie think there was any one in town whom he was in a hurry to get back to?

Three days later Queningford knew that Aggie was going to marry Arthur Gatty, and that John Hurst was going to marry Susie. Susie was not pretty, but she had eyes like Aggie's. After all, Susie was married before her eldest sister; for Aggie had to wait till Arthur's salary rose. He thought it was going to rise at midsummer, or if not at midsummer, then at Michaelmas.

I'd take him for ten fortnights. Heavens, what a relief it must be to get away from 'Aggie'!" And when Arthur got his brother's letter, he and Aggie were quite sorry that they had ever called him the Mammon of Unrighteousness. But the brother kept good company down in Kent. Aggie knew that, in the old abominable Queningford phrase, he was "in with the county."

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