“Mr. Appleditch, I am ashamed of you.  You always will be vulgar.  You always smell of the shop.”

“Well, my dear, how can I help it?  The sugar and soft-soap will smell, you know.”

“Mr. Appleditch, you disgust me!”

“Dear! dear!  I am sorry for that. —­ Suppose we say to Mr. Sutherland —­ "

“Now, you leave that to me.  I’ll tell you what, Mr. Sutherland —­ I’ll give you eighteenpence a lesson, and your dinner on the Sabbath; that is, if you sit under Mr. Lixom in our pew, and walk home with us.”

“That I must decline” said Hugh.  “I must have my Sundays for myself.”

Mrs. Appleditch was disappointed.  She had coveted the additional importance which the visible possession of a live tutor would secure her at “Salem.”

“Ah!  Mr. Sutherland,” she said.  “And I must trust my child, with an immortal soul in his inside, to one who wants the Lord’s only day for himself! —­ for himself, Mr. Sutherland!”

Hugh made no answer, because he had none to make.  Again Mrs. Appleditch resumed: 

“Shall it be a bargain, Mr. Sutherland?  Eighteen-pence a lesson —­ that’s nine shillings a week —­ and begin to morrow?”

Hugh’s heart sunk within him, not so much with disappointment as with disgust.

But to a man who is making nothing, the prospect of earning ever so little, is irresistibly attractive.  Even on a shilling a day, he could keep hunger at arm’s length.  And a beginning is half the battle.  He resolved.

“Let it be a bargain, then, Mrs. Appleditch.”

The lady immediately brightened up, and at once put on her company-manners again, behaving to him with great politeness, and a sneer that would not be hid away under it.  From this Hugh suspected that she had made a better bargain than she had hoped; but the discovery was now too late, even if he could have brought himself to take advantage of it.  He hated bargain-making as heartily as the grocer’s wife loved it.

He very soon rose to take his leave.

“Oh!” said Mrs. Appleditch to her husband, “but Mr. Sutherland has not seen the drawing-room!”

Hugh wondered what there could be remarkable about the drawing-room; but he soon found that it was the pride of Mrs. Appleditch’s heart.  She abstained from all use of it except upon great occasions —­ when parties of her friends came to drink tea with her.  She made a point, however, of showing it to everybody who entered the house for the first time.  So Hugh was led up-stairs, to undergo the operation of being shown the drawing-room, and being expected to be astonished at it.

I asked him what it was like.  He answered:  “It was just what it ought to be —­ rich and ugly.  Mr. Appleditch, in his deacon’s uniform, hung over the fire, and Mrs. Appleditch, in her wedding-dress, over the piano; for there was a piano, and she could play psalm-tunes on it with one finger.  The round table in the middle of the room had books in gilded red and blue covers symmetrically arranged all round it.  This is all I can recollect.”