than clean them yourself, George. But I will tell you one thing
Mr. Wardour would not do if he were a shopkeeper: he would not, like
you, talk one way to the rich, and another way to the poor--all
submission and politeness to the one, and familiarity, even to
rudeness, with the other! If you go on like that, you'll never come
within sight of being a gentleman, George--not if you live to the age
of Methuselah."

"Thank you, Miss Mary! It's a fine thing to have a lady in the shop!
Shouldn't I just like my father to hear you! I'm blowed if I know how a
fellow is to get on with you! Certain sure I am that it ain't _my_
fault if we're not friends."

Mary made no reply. She could not help understanding what George meant,
and she flushed, with honest anger, from brow to chin. But, while her
dark-blue eyes flamed with indignation, her anger was not such as to
render her face less pleasant to look upon. There are as many kinds of
anger as there are of the sunsets with which they ought to end: Mary's
anger had no hate in it.

I must now hope my readers sufficiently interested in my narrative to
care that I should tell them something of what she was like. Plainly as
I see her, I can not do more for them than that. I can not give a
portrait of her; I can but cast her shadow on my page. It was a dainty
half-length, neither tall nor short, in a plain, well-fitting dress of
black silk, with linen collar and cuffs, that rose above the counter,
standing, in spite of displeasure, calm and motionless. Her hair was
dark, and dressed in the simplest manner, without even a reminder of
the hideous occipital structure then in favor--especially with shop
women, who in general choose for imitation and exorbitant development
whatever is ugliest and least lady-like in the fashion of the hour. It
had a natural wave in it, which broke the too straight lines it would
otherwise have made across a forehead of sweet and composing
proportions. Her features were regular--her nose straight--perhaps a
little thin; the curve of her upper lip carefully drawn, as if with
design to express a certain firmness of modesty; and her chin well
shaped, perhaps a little too sharply defined for her years, and rather
large. Everything about her suggested the repose of order satisfied, of
unconstrained obedience to the laws of harmonious relation. The only
fault honest criticism could have suggested, merely suggested, was the
presence of just a possible _nuance_ of pr