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Updated: May 11, 2025
He came pounding home from Woolridge's at a frantic pace, for he never knew now what might be happening, what might have happened in his absence. And so on to the last days of July. In that month Granville, so long deteriorating, was at its worst.
The name, in large white letters, appeared presently in the fanlight above the door. At Woolridge's, on Monday morning in his dinner-hour, Mr. Ransome of the counting-house strolled with great dignity and honor through seven distinct departments as a customer.
He dreaded every interruption and delay that detained him at Woolridge's, every chance encounter that kept him from that lamentable place where he feared and yet desired to be. Yet it was in those last days of July that Granville, as if it had passed through its mortal crisis, took, suddenly, a turn for the better.
He couldn't understand how she could have chosen their first hour of solitude for finding fault with the arrangement of the room. He himself had been distinctly pleased; proud, too, of having furnished throughout from Woolridge's, in a style that would last, and at a double discount which he owed to his payment in ready money, and to his connection with the firm.
"Well, you'll have to." "Of course I'll have to." "Will you go and see him?" "No. I can't. I'll write." He wrote in the afternoon of the next day at Woolridge's, in the luncheon hour when he had the ledger clerks' pen to himself. He was very brief. He received his father-in-law's reply by return. Mr. Usher made no comment beyond an almost perfunctory expression of regret.
There could be no going away for the honeymoon. Woolridge's wouldn't let Ranny go till the sales were over. It was only a minute ago that he had had his arm round Violet's waist, and that her face had pressed his. It seemed ages. And suddenly Violet had shown sulkiness and irritation. He couldn't understand it.
Granville, that would have held its own under any treatment less severe, was overpowered by Woolridge's. "What's wrong with it?" said poor Ranny, as they stood together one Saturday evening and surveyed their front sitting-room. He couldn't see anything wrong with it himself. They had been married that morning. Ranny had had to bring his bride straight from her father's house to Granville.
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.
It appealed to Ransome by the audacity with which it had defied Woolridge's to see its point. Woolridge's itself was a perpetual tempting and solicitation. Ranny wondered how in those days he ever resisted its appeal to him to be a man and risk it and make a home for Winny. And as the months went on he kept himself fitter than ever. He did dumb-bell practice in his bedroom. He sprinted like mad.
Winny was clever, and she had a berth as book-keeper in Starker's, one of the smaller drapers' shops in Oxford Street, near Woolridge's. Her position was as good as his, yet she only earned five pounds a month to his eight. And he hated to think of Winny working, anyway. "Winny," he said, suddenly, "do you like book-keeping?" "Of course I do," said Winny.
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