"I don't know that I think: I feel," Deleah explained.
While she waited for her mother to finish her books she was weighing out and making up into half-ounce packets the tobacco Lydia Day was licensed to sell. She dropped her voice to a more confidential tone, although she and her mother were alone in the shop, where they were doing their evening's work by the aid of the one melancholy gas-burner, to which they restricted themselves after business hours. It gave insufficient light for the low-ceilinged, narrow length of the place.
"Do you think, mama, Bessie ought to be always saying horrid things about Mr. Boult? Making fun of him, mimicking him, complaining of everything he does; not only to you and me, but to Mr. Gibbon? to Emily--to any one who will listen? Do you think a lady--what you and I think a lady, not what Bessie thinks--would do that?"
"Bessie is sensitive--and very proud. We must not forget that--poor Bessie! And Mr. Boult's methods are not always pleasant, Deleah."
"No. But he has been our friend. He has stuck to us. Who else has, of all the people with whom we were friendly? And we were never nice to him, in the old days--not asking him to our parties, you remember, and never being friendly to him on Sunday afternoons. Oh, how I wish we had been, mama!"
Mrs. Day acquiesced, but not with enthusiasm. She did not like George Boult well enough to regret having kept him at arm's length while she could.
"I am sure we ought to be grateful to him," Mrs. Day admitted. She was very tired; the scent of the tobacco Deleah was pulling about, staining the tips of her small white fingers, was in her nostrils; she did not feel especially grateful.
"Then, when Bessie is laying down the law about what a lady should do I wish you would remind her, mama, that a lady must show gratitude for kindness."
"And why, my dear, are you suddenly fighting the battles of poor Mr. Boult?"
"That is a secret," Deleah said. "But one day, if you are good, I will tell you."
The sitting-room, with supper nicely laid, with Bessie nicely dressed, fair and plump and attractive in the gas light, happily chatting to Mr. Gibbon, looked a Paradise of Rest in the eyes of poor wearied Mrs. Day. The room was in fact a very pleasant one; long, low, with broad seats before each of the three windows looking into the street; with a tall and narrow oak mantelpiece opposite the three windows; with panelled oak walls, heavy oak rafters, supporting the low ceiling, old brass finger plates high up on the oaken door--all as in the days when old Jonas Carr's grandfather first kept shop in Bridge Street. It was made sweet with flowers too. A basket of pink tulips set in moss occupied the central position on the supper-table, and some pots of primulas, fully in bloom, were on the window-seats; above that window upon the corner of whose seat Miss Deleah Day liked to sit, her slight and supple body curled into as small as possible a space in order not to incommode the primulas, a brass birdcage holding a canary was hung.