every human creature, old and young,
dropped its obsequious curtsey as they passed, she could first have
beaten them for so degrading her, and the next moment felt a feverish
pleasure in thus parading her petty power before a man who in his
doctrinaire pedantry had no sense of poetry, or of the dear old natural
relations of country life.

They went first to Mrs. Jellison's, to whom Marcella wished to unfold
her workshop scheme.

"Don't let me keep you," she said to Wharton coldly, as they neared the
cottage; "I know you have to catch your train."

Wharton consulted his watch. He had to be at a local station some two
miles off within an hour.

"Oh! I have time," he said. "Do take me in, Miss Boyce. I have made
acquaintance with these people so far, as my constituents--now show them
to me as your subjects. Besides, I am an observer. I 'collect' peasants.
They are my study."

"They are not my subjects, but my friends," she said with the same
stiffness.

They found Mrs. Jellison having her dinner. The lively old woman was
sitting close against her bit of fire, on her left a small deal table
which held her cold potatoes and cold bacon; on her right a tiny window
and window-sill whereon lay her coil of "plait" and the simple
straw-splitting machine she had just been working. When Marcella had
taken the only other chair the hovel contained, nothing else remained
for Wharton but to flatten himself as closely against the door as he
might.

"I'm sorry I can't bid yer take a cheer," said Mrs. Jellison to him,
"but what yer han't got yer can't give, so I don't trouble my head about
nothink."

Wharton applauded her with easy politeness, and then gave himself, with
folded arms, to examining the cottage while Marcella talked. It might be
ten feet broad, he thought, by six feet in one part and eight feet in
another. The roof was within little more than an inch of his head. The
stairway in the corner was falling to pieces; he wondered how the woman
got up safely to her bed at night; custom, he supposed, can make even
old bones agile.

Meanwhile Marcella was unfolding the project of the straw-plaiting
workshop that she and Lady Winterbourne were about to start. Mrs.
Jellison put on her spectacles apparently that she might hear the
better, pushed away her dinner in spite of her visitors' civilities, and
listened with a bright and beady eye.

"An' yer agoin' to pay me one a sixpence a score, where I now gets
ninepence. And I