Angela took her by the hand. "I am sure," she said kindly, "that we shall be friends."
"Friends!" cried Mr. Bunker, aghast. "Why, she's to be one of your girls! You _can't_ be friends with your own girls."
"Perhaps," said the girl, blushing and abashed, "you would like to see some of my work." She spread out her work on the table.
"Fine weather here, cap'n," Mr. Bunker went on, striking an attitude of patronage, as if the sun was good indeed to shine on an almshouse. "Fine weather should make grateful hearts, especially in them as is provided for--having been improvident in their youth--with comfortable roofs to shelter them."
"Grateful hearts, indeed, Mr. Bunker," said the captain quietly.
"Mr. Bunker"--Angela turned upon him with an air of command, and pointed to the door--"you may go now. You have done all I wanted."
Mr. Bunker turned very red. "He could go!" Was he to be ordered about by every little dressmaker? "He could go!"
"If the lady engages my daughter, Mr. Bunker," said Captain Sorensen, "I will try to find the five shillings next week."
"Five shillings!" cried Angela. "Why, I have just given him five shillings for his recommendation."
Mr. Bunker did not explain that his practice was to get five shillings from both sides, but he retreated with as much dignity as could be expected.
He asked, outside, with shame, how it was that he allowed himself thus to be sat upon and ordered out of the house by a mere girl. Why had he not stood upon his dignity? To be told he might go, and before an inmate--a common pauper!
There is one consolation always open, thank Heaven, for the meanest among us poor worms of earth. We are gifted with imaginations; we can make the impossible an actual fact, and can with the eye of the mind make the unreal stand before us in the flesh. Therefore, when we are down-trodden, we may proceed, without the trouble and danger of turning (which has been known to bring total extinction upon a worm), to take revenge upon our enemy in imagination. Mr. Bunker, who was at this moment uncertain whether he hated Miss Kennedy more than he hated his nephew, went home glowing with the thought that but a few short months would elapse before he should be able to set his foot upon the former and crush her. Because, at the rate she was going on, she would not last more than that time. Then would he send in his bills, sue her, sell her up, and drive her out of the place stripped of the last farthing. "He might go!" He, Bunker, was told that he might go! And in the presence of an inmate. Then he thought of his nephew, and while he smote the pavement with the iron end of his umbrella, a cold dew appeared upon his nose, the place where inward agitation is frequently betrayed in this way, and he shivered, looking about him suddenly as if he was frightened. Yet what harm was Harry Goslett likely to do him?