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Updated: May 13, 2025
Her father was a farmer, a small farmer. The trouble was that Violet couldn't bear the country. She wouldn't stay a day in it if she could help it. She was all for life. She'd been about a year in town. No, Winny hadn't known her for a year. Only for a few months really, since she came to Starker's. She'd been in several situations before that. She was assistant at the ribbon counter at Starker's.
And I got me death of cold. And in the morning me cough started, and they wouldn't take me in any of the shops because of it. "I tried all morning. Starker's first. Then in the afternoon I went to Father, and he wouldn't have me. He won't believe I haven't been bad, because of me things and me cough. I suppose he thinks I've got consumption or something.
Violet's voice insisted. "Because we couldn't." He drew her to him. Her eyes closed and their faces met, flame to flame. "Poor little thing," he said. "Is its head hot? And is it tired?" "Ranny," she said, "is your mother still upstairs?" "She'll be gone in a minute," he whispered, thickly. Violet's connection with Starker's ceased on the day of her marriage.
And now when she raised her old cry again, "I can't see why I shouldn't have gone on at Starker's like I did," instead of saying "Somebody's got to look after Granville" Ranny answered, "This is why." All through the winter the charwoman came every day. And one midnight, in the first week of March, nineteen-five, Violet's child was born. It was a daughter.
Still, to him, her husband, Starker's statement of account represented directly, with the perfection of business precision, the cost of getting rid of her; it was so simply and openly the cost of her outfit, of all that she had trailed with her in her flight.
For gentlemen came to the Millinery Saloons, gentlemen whose looks said plainly that they found her prettier than the ladies that they brought; gentlemen who sometimes came again alone, who for two words would buy a hat and give it you. At Starker's there was always a chance of something happening. At Granville nothing happened, nothing ever could happen.
By making a dash for it from Woolridge's he could reach Starker's just in time to catch Winny as she came out, delicately stepping through the little door in the great iron shutter. Evening after evening he was there and never caught her. She was off before he could get through the door in his own shutter.
She smiled at him as he turned away, and in the middle of his own misery it struck him that poor Maudie would have to wait many years before Booty could afford to marry her, and that already her proud beauty was a little sharpened and a little dimmed by waiting. On Monday he refrained from hanging round the door in Starker's iron shutter.
And then, again and again, with infinite patience and gentleness, he explained that the privileges of acquiring Granville entailed duties and responsibilities incompatible with her attendance in Starker's Millinery Saloons. He pointed out that if they were dependent upon Granville, Granville was also dependent upon them. Granville, she could see for herself, was helpless pathetic he was.
But all her past extravagance did nothing to prepare him for the extent to which, as he expressed it, she could "go it," when she had, as you might say, an incentive. That, the chemist's, was in a way the worst. Still, they amounted but to a few pounds and an odd shilling or two. Starker's bill did the rest. The three-guinea costumes he could understand.
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