“And what is it to be to-night, Miss Fleckring?  These aren’t quite your hours, are they?  But I suppose you’ve been very upset.”

“Oh,” said Rachel, “I only want a large tin of Singapore Delicious Chunks, please.”

But if she had announced her intention of spending a thousand pounds in Ted Malkin’s shop she would not have better pleased him.  He beamed.  He desired the whole shop to hear that order, for it was the vindication of honest, modest trading—­of his father’s methods and his own.  His father, himself, and about a couple of other tradesmen had steadily fought the fight of the market-place against St. Luke’s Square in the day of its glory, and more recently against the powerfully magnetic large shops at Hanbridge, and they had not been defeated.  As for Ted Malkin, he was now beyond doubt the “best” provision-dealer and grocer in the town, and had drawn ahead even of “Holl’s” (as it was still called), the one good historic shop left in Luke’s Square.  The onslaught of Wason had alarmed him, though he had pretended to ignore it.  But he was delectably reassured by this heavenly incident of the representative of one of his most distinguished customers coming into the shop and deliberately choosing to buy preserved pineapple from him at 8-1/2d. when it could be got thirty yards away for 7 1/2d.  Rachel read his thoughts plainly.  She knew well enough that she had done rather a fine thing, and her demeanour showed it.  Ted Malkin enveloped the tin in suitable paper.

“Sure there’s nothing else?”

“Not at this counter.”

He gave her the tin, smiled, and as he turned to the next waiting customer, called out—­

“Singapore Delicious, eight and a half pence.”

It was rather a poor affair, that tin—­a declension from the great days of Mrs. Maldon’s married life, when she spent freely, knowing naught of her husband’s income except that it was large and elastic.  In those days she would buy a real pineapple, entire, once every three weeks or so, costing five, six, seven, or eight shillings—­gorgeous and spectacular fruit.  Now she might have pineapple every day if she chose, but it was not quite the same pineapple.  She affected to like it, she did like it, but the difference between the old pineapple and the new was the saddening difference, for Mrs. Maldon’s secret heart, between the great days and the paltry, facile convenience of the twentieth century.

It was to his aunt, who presided over the opposite side of the shop, including the cash-desk, that Ted Malkin proclaimed in a loud voice the amounts of purchases on his own side.  Miss Malkin was a virgin of fifty-eight years’ standing, with definite and unchangeable ideas on every subject on earth or in heaven except her own age.  As Rachel, followed by Louis Fores, crossed the shop, Miss Malkin looked at them and closed her lips, and lowered her eyelids, and the upper part of her body seemed to curve slightly, with the sinuosity of a serpent—­a strange, significant movement, sometimes ill described as “bridling.”