o." Perhaps Sally felt it would be a feeble line of defence to dwell
on the scarcity of good violinists among sweeps and dustmen, and that
was why she fell into rank without comment.

This short conversation, some weeks on in the story, lets in one or
two gleams of side-light. It shows that Sally's permission to the
young man Bradshaw to call at her mother's had been promptly taken
advantage of--jumped at is the right expression. Also that Miss Wilson
had stuck-up ideas. Also that Sally was a disciple of what used to be
called Socialism; only really nowadays such a lot of things get called
Socialism that the word has lost all the discriminative force one
values so much in nouns substantive. Also (only we knew it already)
that Sally was no lawyer. We do not love her the less, for our part.

But nothing in this interchange of shots between Sally and her friend,
nor in anything she said to her mother about Mr. Bradshaw, gives its
due prominence to the fact that, though that young gentleman was a
devout worshipper at the shrine of St. Satisfax, he had only become so
on the Sunday after Miss Sally had casually mentioned the latter as a
saint she frequented. Perhaps she "dismissed it from her mind," and it
was obliging enough to go. Perhaps she considered she had done her
duty by it when she put on record, in soliloquy, her opinion that if
people chose to be gaping idiots they might, and she couldn't help
it. She had a happy faculty for doing what she called putting young
whippersnappers in their proper places. This only meant that
she managed to convey to them that the lines they might elect to
whippersnap on were not to be those of sentimental nonsense. And
perhaps she really dealt in the wisest way with Mr. Bradshaw's
romantic adoration of her at a distance when he fished for leave to
call upon her. The line he made his application on was that he should
so like to play her a rapid movement by an unpronounceable Slav. She
said directly, why not come and bring his violin on Wednesday evening
at nine? That was her mother's address on the card on the fiddle-case.
He must recollect it--which he did unequivocally.

Now, if this young lady had had a fan, she might have tittered with
it, or blushed slightly, and said, "Oh, Mr. Bradshaw!" or, "Oh, sir!"
like in an old novel--one by Fanny Burney, or the like. But she did
nothing of the sort, and the consequence was that he had, as it were,
to change the _venue_ of his adoration--t