Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 1.djvu/21

Rh as Mrs. Beever with some emphasis put it, "right through everything."

This picture of the situation had filled, after the first hour or two, much of the time of the two ladies, but it had originally included for Jean no particular portrait of the head of the family—an omission in some degree repaired, however, by the chance of Mrs. Beever's having on the Saturday morning taken her for a moment into the Bank. They had had errands in the town, and Mrs. Beever had wished to speak to Mr. Bream, a brilliant, joking gentleman, who, instantly succumbing to their invasion and turning out a confidential clerk, had received them in his beautiful private room. "Shall I like him?" Jean, with the sense of a widening circle, had, before this, adventurously asked. "Oh, yes, if you notice him!" Mrs. Beever had replied in obedience to an odd private prompting to mark him as insignificant. Later on, at the Bank, the girl noticed him enough to feel rather afraid of him: that was always with her the foremost result of being noticed herself. If Mrs. Beever passed him over, this was in part to be accounted for by all that at Eastmead was usually taken for granted. The