She addressed Mr. Gammon, who had seated himself on a corner of the table, as if to watch and listen.  He was a short, thick-set man with dark, wiry hair roughened into innumerable curls, and similar whiskers ending in a clean razor-line halfway down the cheek.  His eyes were blue and had a wondering innocence, which seemed partly the result of facetious affectation, as also was the peculiar curve of his lips, ever ready for joke or laughter.  Yet the broad, mobile countenance had lines of shrewdness and of strength, plain enough whenever it relapsed into gravity, and the rude shaping of jaw and chin might have warned anyone disposed to take advantage of the man’s good nature.  He wore a suit of coarse tweed, a brown bowler hat, a blue cotton shirt with white stock and horseshoe pin, rough brown leggings, tan boots, and in his hand was a dog-whip.  This costume signified that Mr. Gammon felt at leisure, contrasting as strongly as possible with the garb in which he was wont to go about his ordinary business—­that of commercial traveller.  He had a liking for dogs, and kept a number of them in the back premises of an inn at Dulwich, whither he usually repaired on Sundays.  When at Dulwich, Mr. Gammon fancied himself in completely rural seclusion; it seemed to him that he had shaken off the dust of cities, that he was far from the clamour of the crowd, amid peace and simplicity; hence his rustic attire, in which he was fond of being photographed with dogs about him.  A true-born child of town, he would have found the real country quite unendurable; in his doggy rambles about Dulwich he always preferred a northerly direction, and was never so happy as when sitting in the inn-parlour amid a group of friends whose voices rang the purest Cockney.  Even in his business he disliked engagements which took him far from London; his “speciality” (as he would have said) was town travel, and few men had had more varied experience in that region of enterprise.

“I’m going to have a look at the bow-wows,” he replied to Mrs. Bubb.  “Polly won’t come with me; unkind of her, ain’t it?”

“Mr. Gammon,” remarked the young lady with a severe glance, “I’ll thank you not to be so familiar with my name.  If you don’t know any better, let me tell you it’s very ungentlemanly.”

He rose, doffed his hat, bowed profoundly, and begged her pardon, in acknowledgment of which Polly gave a toss of the head.  Miss Sparkes was neither beautiful nor stately, but her appearance had the sort of distinction which corresponds to these qualities in the society of Kennington Road; she filled an appreciable space in the eyes of Mr. Gammon; her abundance of auburn hair, her high colour, her full lips and excellent teeth, her finely-developed bust, and the freedom of her poses (which always appeared to challenge admiration and anticipate impertinence) had their effectiveness against a kitchen background, and did not entirely lose it when she flitted about the stalls at the theatre selling programmes.  She was but two-and-twenty.  Mr. Gammon had reached his fortieth year.  In general his tone of intimacy passed without rebuke; at moments it had seemed not unacceptable.  But Polly’s temper was notoriously uncertain, and her frankness never left people in doubt as to the prevailing mood.