Mrs. Tarns pulled the gate towards herself and, crushed behind it,
curtsied to Thomas Batchgrew. This curtsy, the most servile of all
Western salutations, and now nearly unknown in Five Towns, consisted
in a momentary shortening of the stature by six inches, and in nothing
else. Mrs. Tams had acquired it in her native village of Sneyd, where
an earl held fast to that which was good, and she had never been able
to quite lose it. It did far more than the celerity of the chauffeur
to appease Thomas Batchgrew.
Snorting and self-conscious, and with his white whiskers flying behind
him, he stepped in his two overcoats across the narrow, muddy pavement
and on to Mrs. Tarn's virgin stonework, and with two haughty black
footmarks he instantly ruined it. The tragedy produced no effect on
Mrs. Tams. And indeed nobody in the Five Towns would have been moved
by it. For the social convention as to porticoes enjoined, not that
they should remain clean, but simply that they should show evidence
of having been clean at some moment early in each day. It mattered not
how dirty they were in general, provided that the religious and futile
rite of stoning had been demonstrably performed during the morning.
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