Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/200

 and happy, exchanging crackling witticisms with the gentlemen who baited her. She had, too, a liking, fatal to one of her tendency to plumpness, a great liking for the ale that came out of the shiny brass-bound tuns served by Teena Bitts. "That Mrs. Crumyss," she used to say in relating to her mother choice bits of that lady's wit, "She's a hot 'un." She had a way of emphasizing such remarks by a hearty slap on her round, well-covered thigh. There was all the zest about Our Bess that Rubens, who loved life, imparted to the plump rosy ladies who were so like her. Winterbottom, the proprietor of the Pot and Pie, understood her value to him. He did not even object to her enforced holidays.

But Bessie never had any money. It was not that she spent it, even in betting on the races, as might have been supposed. She had a 'orror of betting and of bookmakers as bookmakers. She never had any money because she never understood how it was people got money. Even Winterbottom underpaid her. Sometimes her "friends" gave her a cheap trinket or a pair of silk stockings or a few shillings but rarely more than that. Teena Bitts said scornfully that she had no character. But Our Bess only laughed and asked Teena what her character had got her beyond a reputation for being coldblooded and stingy.

The development of character in Our Bess—that change which turned her in the end into Aunt Bessie of Bloomsbury and St. John's Chapel—dated from the twenty-fourth of December, 1905, a cold foggy