ake her an allowance of two shillings a week.
She was very angry. Yet her anger was of that dangerous,
half-ironical sort which wears away its subject and has no outward
effect. A feeling of half-bitter mockery kept her going. In the
ponderous, rather sordid nullity of Manchester House she became
shadowy and absorbed, absorbed in nothing in particular, yet
absorbed. She was always more or less busy: and certainly there was
always something to be done, whether she did it or not.

The shop was opened once a week, on Friday evenings. James Houghton
prowled round the warehouses in Knarborough and picked up job lots
of stuff, with which he replenished his shabby window. But his heart
was not in the business. Mere tenacity made him hover on with it.

In midsummer Albert Witham came to Woodhouse, and Alvina was invited
to tea. She was very much excited. All the time imagining Albert a
taller, finer Arthur, she had abstained from actually fixing her
mind upon this latter little man. Picture her disappointment when
she found Albert quite unattractive. He was tall and thin and
brittle, with a pale, rather dry, flattish face, and with curious
pale eyes. His impression was one of uncanny flatness, something
like a lemon sole. Curiously flat and fish-like he was, one might
have imagined his backbone to be spread like the backbone of a sole
or a plaice. His teeth were sound, but rather large and yellowish
and flat. A most curious person.

He spoke in a slightly mouthing way, not well bred in spite of
Oxford. There was a distinct Woodhouse twang. He would never be a
gentleman if he lived for ever. Yet he was not ordinary. Really an
odd fish: quite interesting, if one could get over the feeling that
one was looking at him through the glass wall of an aquarium: that
most horrifying of all boundaries between two worlds. In an aquarium
fish seem to come smiling broadly to the doorway, and there to stand
talking to one, in a mouthing fashion, awful to behold. For one
hears no sound from all their mouthing and staring conversation. Now
although Albert Witham had a good strong voice, which rang like
water among rocks in her ear, still she seemed never to hear a word
he was saying. He smiled down at her and fixed her and swayed his
head, and said quite original things, really. For he was a genuine
odd fish. And yet she seemed to hear no sound, no word from him:
nothing came to her. Perhaps as a matter of fact fish do actually
pronounce st