She’d disappeared into the room behind the shop, but she came back as I tapped on the counter. So we were face to face. Ah! No sign. Didn’t recognise me. Just looked at me the way they do. You know the way small shopkeepers look at their customers—utter lack of interest.

It was the first time I’d seen her full face, and though I half expected what I saw, it gave me almost as big a shock as that first moment when I’d recognised her. I suppose when you look at the face of someone young, even of a child, you ought to be able to foresee what it’ll look like when it’s old. It’s all a question of the shape of the bones. But if it had ever occurred to me, when I was twenty and she was twenty-two, to wonder what Elsie would look like at forty-seven, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind that she could ever look like that. The whole face had kind of sagged, as if it had somehow been drawn downwards. Do you know that type of middle-aged woman that has a face just like a bulldog? Great underhung jaw, mouth turned down at the corners, eyes sunken, with pouches underneath. Exactly like a bulldog. And yet it was the same face, I’d have known it in a million. Her hair wasn’t completely grey, it was a kind of dirty colour, and there was much less of it than there used to be. She didn’t know me from Adam. I was just a customer, a stranger, an uninteresting fat man. It’s queer what an inch or two of fat can do. I wondered whether I’d changed even more than she had, or whether it was merely that she wasn’t expecting to see me, or whether—what was the likeliest of all—she’d simply forgotten my existence.

“Devening,” she said, in that listless way they have.

“I want a pipe,” I said flatly. “A briar pipe.”

“A pipe. Now jest lemme see. I know we gossome pipes somewhere. Now where did I—ah! ‘Ere we are.”

She took a cardboard box full of pipes from somewhere under the counter. How bad her accent had got! Or maybe I was just imagining that, because my own standards had changed? But no, she used to be so “superior,” all the girls at Lilywhite’s were so “superior,” and she’d been a member of the vicar’s Reading Circle. I swear she never used to drop her aitches. It’s queer how these women go to pieces once they’re married. I fiddled among the pipes for a moment and pretended to look them over. Finally I said I’d like one with an amber mouthpiece.

“Amber? I don’t know as we got any—” She turned towards the back of the shop and called: “Ge-orge!”

So the other bloke’s name was George too. A noise that sounded something like “Ur!” came from the back of the shop.

“Ge-orge! Where ju put that other box of pipes?”