“You’ll find it chilly where you are living, ma’am, but it isn’t damp, that’s one comfort. The bottom of your street is damp, and down here in a flood anything like what we had fourteen years ago, we are nearly drowned. If you’ll step outside with me I’ll show you how high the water rose.” He opened the door, and Mrs. Fairfax thought it courteous not to refuse. He walked to the back of his cabin bareheaded, although the morning was cold, and pointed out to her the white paint mark on the wall. She, dropped her receipted bill in the black mud and stooped to pick it up. Mr. Cobb plunged after it and wiped it carefully on his silk pocket-handkerchief. Mrs. Cobb’s bay window commanded the whole length of the coal-yard. In this bay window she always sat and worked and nodded to the customers, or gossiped with them as they passed. She turned her back on Mrs. Fairfax both when she entered the yard and when she left it, but watched her carefully. Mr. Cobb came into dinner, but his wife bided her time, knowing that, as he took snuff, the handkerchief would be used. It was very provoking, he was absent-minded, and forgot his usual pinch before he sat down to his meal. For three-quarters of an hour his wife was afflicted with painfully uneasy impatience, and found it very difficult to reply to Mr. Cobb’s occasional remarks. At last the cheese was finished, the snuff-box appeared, and after it the handkerchief.
“A pretty mess that handkerchief is in, Cobb.” She always called him simply “Cobb.”
“Yes, it was an a-a-accident. I must have a clean one. I didn’t think it was so dirty.”
“The washing of your snuffy handkerchiefs costs quite enough as it is, Cobb, without using them in that way.”
“Oh, I saw it all, going out without your hat and standing there like a silly fool cleaning that bit of paper. I wonder what the lightermen thought of you.”
It will already have been noticed that the question what other people thought was always the test which was put in Langborough whenever anything was done or anything happened not in accordance with the usual routine, and Mrs. Cobb struck at her husband’s conscience by referring him to his lightermen. She continued—
“And you know what she is as well as I do, and if she’d been respectable you’d have been rude to her, as you generally are.”