She passed a second-hand
bookstall without seeing it, and then discerned admirable potatoes at
three-halfpence a peck less than she had been paying--and Mrs. Maldon
was once more set down as an old lady with peculiarities. However, by
the time Rachel had made a critical round of the entire place, with
its birds in cages, popular songs at a penny, sweetstuffs, cheap
cottons and woollens, bright tinware, colonial fleshmeat, sausage
displays, and particularly its cheeses, Mrs. Maldon was already
recovering her reputation as a woman whose death was an irreparable
loss to the town.
As Rachel passed the negligible second-hand bookstall again, it was
made visible to her by the fact that Councillor Thomas Batchgrew was
just emerging from the shop behind it, with a large volume in his
black-gloved hands. Thomas Batchgrew came out of the dark bookshop
as a famous old actor, accustomed to decades of crude public worship,
comes out of a fashionable restaurant into a fashionable thoroughfare.
His satisfied and self-conscious countenance showed that he knew
that nearly everybody in sight was or ought to be acquainted with his
identity and his renown, and showed also that his pretence of being
unaware of this tremendous and luscious fact was playful and not
seriously meant to deceive a world of admirers.
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