at
all; no man's face _could_ express that immense amount; especially the
fair, refined, intellectual, gentlemanlike face which had had--and by
her own more than once repeated avowal--so much to do with the enormous
fancy she had originally taken to him. "Which--frankly now--would you
personally _rather_ I should do," he had at any rate asked her with an
intention of supreme irony: "just sordidly marry you on top of this, or
leave you the pleasure of your lovely appearance in court and of your so
assured (since that's how you feel it) big haul of damages? Sha'n't
you be awfully disappointed, in fact, if I don't let you get something
better out of me than a poor plain ten-shilling gold ring and the rest
of the blasphemous rubbish, as we should make it between us, pronounced
at the altar? I take it of course," he had swaggered on, "that your
pretension wouldn't be for a moment that I should--after the act of
profanity--take up my life with you."

"It's just as much my dream as it ever was, Herbert Dodd, to take up
mine with _you!_ Remember for me that I can do with it, my dear, that my
idea is for even as much as that of you!" she had cried; "remember that
for me, Herbert Dodd; remember, remember!"

It was on this she had left him--left him frankly under a mortal chill.
There might have been the last ring of an appeal or a show of persistent
and perverse tenderness in it, however preposterous any such matter; but
in point of fact her large, clean, plain, brown face--so much too big
for her head, he now more than ever felt it to be, just as her head was
so much too big for her body, and just as her hats had an irritating way
of appearing to decline choice and conformity in respect to _any_ of her
dimensions--presented itself with about as much expression as his own
shop-window when the broad, blank, sallow blind was down. He was fond of
his shop-window with some good show on; he had a fancy for a good show
and was master of twenty different schemes of taking arrangement for the
old books and prints, "high-class rarities" his modest catalogue called
them, in which he dealt and which his maternal uncle, David Geddes, had,
as he liked to say, "handed down" to him. His widowed mother had screwed
the whole thing, the stock and the connection and the rather bad little
house in the rather bad little street, out of the ancient worthy,
shortly before his death, in the name of the youngest and most
interesting, the "delicate" one