Cranford

We had too much to think about to talk much that afternoon. It passed over very tranquilly. But when the tea-urn was brought in a new thought came into my head. Why should not Miss Matty sell tea— be an agent to the East India Tea Company which then existed? I could see no objections to this plan, while the advantages were many— always supposing that Miss Matty could get over the degradation of condescending to anything like trade. Tea was neither greasy nor sticky— grease and stickiness being two of the qualities which Miss Matty could not endure. No shop-window would be required. A small, genteel notification of her being licensed to sell tea would, it is true, be necessary, but I hoped that it could be placed where no one would see it. Neither was tea a heavy article, so as to tax Miss Matty’s fragile strength. The only thing against my plan was the buying and selling involved. While I was giving but absent answers to the questions Miss Matty was putting— almost as absently— we heard a clumping sound on the stairs, and a whispering outside the door, which indeed once opened and shut as if by some invisible agency. After a little while Martha came in, dragging after her a great tall young man, all crimson with shyness, and finding his only relief in perpetually sleeking down his hair. “Please, ma’am, he’s only Jem Hearn,” said Martha, by way of an introduction; and so out of breath was she that I imagine she had had some bodily struggle before she could overcome his reluctance to be presented on the courtly scene of Miss Matilda Jenkyns’s drawing-room.