She had worn her white silk, the one she was afterwards married in, and her hair had been curled by a real hairdresser—the maids had dubbed together to pay for his attendance, and he had afterwards stayed for the dancing and paid special attention to Gertrude. “And you should’ve seen our John, his eyes simply rolling with jealousy…” But, if she managed to get so far, she was then interrupted. No one wanted to hear about her conquests, but they were willing to hear about the dresses. What did the cook wear? Black lace over a red silk underslip. That sounded handsome. And the head housemaid and the stillroom maid, and so on, down to the tweeny, who, it had to be confessed, could afford nothing more exciting than her best frock of grey cloth.

Gertie was the only one of them all who discussed her relations with her husband. “I don’t think our Johnny loves me any more,” she would sigh. “He went off to work this morning without kissing me.” Or, “Our John’s getting a regular chawbacon. He went to sleep and snored in his chair after tea last night. I felt that lonely I could have cried me eyes out.” And the more robust characters would laugh and ask her what more she expected of a man who had been at work in the fields all day, or say, “Times is changed, my gal. You ain’t courtin’ no longer.”

Gertie was a fool and the hamlet laughing-stock for a year or so; then young John arrived and the white silk was cut up to make him a christening robe and Gertie forgot her past triumphs in the more recent one of producing such a paragon. “Isn’t he lovely?” she would say, exhibiting her red, shapeless lump of a son, and those who had been most unsympathetic with her former outpourings would be the first to declare him a marvellous boy. “He’s the very spit of his dad; but he’s got your eyes, Gertie. My word! He’s going to break some hearts when the time comes, you’ll see.” As time went on, Gertie grew red and lumpy herself. Gone were the wasp waist and the waxen pallor she had thought so genteel. But she still managed to keep her romantic ideas, and the last time Laura saw her, by that time a middle-aged woman, she assured her that her daughter’s recent marriage to a stable-boy was “a regular romance in real life,” although, as far as her listener could gather, it was what the hamlet people of the preceding generation would have called “a pushed on, hugger-mugger sort of affair.”