No, Rome was not built in a day, nor could Jinny have become the carrier “all of an onplunge,” as Caleb would have put it. That would have shocked the manners and morals of Bradmarsh, both Little and Long, and upset the decorum of Chipstone. A gradual preparation had been necessary, a transition by which Jinny changed into the carrier as imperceptibly as she had ripened into the girl. At first the small “furriner”—the carried and not the carrier—reposing in the cart because, after smallpox had snatched away both her parents in the same week, her grandfather, who had imported her, had nowhere else to put her; playing in the great canvas-covered playground that held as many heights, depths, and obstacles as a steeplechase course; petted by every client for her helplessness before her helpfulness gave her a second lease of favour; bearing a literally larger and larger hand in “Gran’fer’s” transactions as he grew older and older; correcting with cautious tact his memories, his accounts, his muddled bookings and deliveries, in due course ousting the octogenarian even from his place on the driving-board and carrying him first by her side and then inside in his second childhood, just as he had carried her in her first—a stage in which his cackle with the customers carried on the continuity of the male tradition; leaving him at home on bad days—whether his own or Nature’s—and then altogether in the winter, and then altogether in the spring, and then altogether in the autumn, and finally—when he reached his nineties—altogether in the summer; Jinny the Carrier was—it will be seen—a shock so subtly prepared and so long discounted as to have been practically imperceptible. She might crack Daniel’s heavy whip, but nobody felt the flourish as other than vicarious, if not indeed a sort of play-acting evoking the pleasure a more sophisticated audience finds in Rosalind’s swashbucklings. Not that she made any brazen pretences to equality in lifting boxes; she sat with due feminine humility while male muscles swelled and contracted under her presiding smile and the rippling music of her thanks.
Here was, in fact, the prosaic purpose of the little horn slung at her side—her one apparent embellishment of the tradition: it summoned her slavish superiors so that she might be spared alighting and re-climbing with goods. In face of the accuracy of her operations, this display of helplessness probably helped to remove the sting of an otherwise intolerable feminine sufficiency: it was perhaps the secret of her popularity. Even with the most Lilliputian packets nobody expected Jinny to descend and knock at their doors—one blast and old and young tumbled over one another to greet the coming or speed the parting parcel. It was indeed as if a good fairy should condescend to do your marketing, a fairy in a straw bonnet (piquantly tied under the chin in a bow with drooping ends), a fairy whose brilliant smile and teeth and flowing ringlets could convert even an order for jalap into poetry, nay, induce in the eternal masculine a craving for more. In fine, so topsy-turvily had this snail-paced transition worked, so slowly had Jinny’s freedom broadened down from precedent to precedent, that when strangers expressed disapproval at these mannish courses, Little Bradmarsh was shocked, Long Bradmarsh surprised, and Chipstone scornful. Not that they were at all prepared to argue the question in the abstract. Their prejudice against carrying as a profession for women remained as rooted and unshaken as the critic’s. Women? Who was speaking of women? Jinny was Jinny—a being unique and irreplaceable, “bless her bonny fice.” It contributed to her unquestionability that the Quarleses had been carriers for a hundred years—and more.
