the men's depreciation at
the hands of other women. Then it becomes a point of honour alike with
the proudest and the meekest of her sex to stand up in his absence in
defence of the discarded swain.

"I don't know about ambition," began Dora hesitatingly, "but father says
Tom Robinson is not at all stupid; he took his degree with credit at
Cambridge, and was not plucked like poor Ned Hewett, or that fop, Cyril
Carey. Father says when he worked with Mr. Robinson in getting up the
bill to lay before Parliament for closing the old churchyard, he could
not have desired a more intelligent, diligent fellow-worker. All the
salesmen and women at 'Robinson's' have been well looked after, and are
superior to the other shop-people in the town, don't you know? There is
Miss Franklin at the head of both the millinery and mantua-making
departments; I am sure she looks and speaks, as well as dresses,
like a lady?"

"Yes, and everybody is civil to her, but nobody thinks of making
her acquaintance out of the shop, and she is wise enough to keep
to her proper sphere. They say she is a distant relation of Tom
Robinson's--you see he is not altogether destitute of kindred.
Why does the man not marry her? That would be a suitable match."

"Annie!" protested Dora, in nearly speechless indignation, and then she
recovered breath and words. "She's forty if she's a day; and she's as
fat as a pin-cushion, with her cheeks a mottled red all over."

"How can you make such unkind remarks on your neighbours' looks? _He_
is not an Adonis, I may be allowed to say; and I have noticed that
shopkeepers are apt to marry women older than themselves, women who
have been in the trade--to keep the business together, I suppose."

"At least, his father did not marry like that either in his first or in
his second marriage," retorted Dora; "for the first Mrs. Robinson was
the daughter of a curate, and the second of a farmer, and she was not
half his age, though she did not survive him long."

"As you please. What's Hecuba to me, or what am I to Hecuba?" demanded
Annie airily.

"Besides," Dora returned laboriously to the charge, "there are
shopkeepers and shopkeepers, as you must be aware, Annie. Father says
old Mr. Robinson was a man of independent ideas and original mind, and
had his own theories of trade."

"I have nothing to say against it, especially at this hour of the night,
or morning," said Annie, professing to strangle a yawn; "only that I do
not