if she had been saying all the evening with long accumulating preparedness, holding her poise throughout the interruptions of customers and down into the details of the story of her adventures, Yes I know your opinions, I have heard them all my life, and now I’m out in the world myself and can meet everybody as an equal, and say what I think, without wondering whether it suits my part as the Greens’ governess. She had got her strength from the things she had done. It was amazing to think of her summoning courage to break again with the Greens and borrowing from them to start in business, Mr. Green “setting his heart” on the success of the little shop and meaning to come down and see how it was getting on. How awful it would be if it did not get on. … But it was getting on. … How terrifying it must have been at first not knowing the price of anything in the shop or what to buy for it … and then, customers telling her the prices of things and where they were kept, and travellers being kind ; respectful and friendly and ready to go out of their way to do anything … that was the other side of Maupassant’s “ hourrah pour la petite difference ” commis voyageurs … and well-to-do people in the neighbourhood rushing in for some little thing, taken aback to find a lady behind the counter, and coming again for all sorts of things. … Eve would become like one of those middle-aged women shopkeepers in books, in the country, with a kind heart and a sarcastic tongue, seeing through everybody and having the same manner for the vicar and a ploughman, or a rather nicer manner for a ploughman. No. Eve was still sentimental. …
Those wonderful letters were a bridge; a promise for the future. … They were the letters of a boy; that was the struggling impression she had not been able to convey. She could start the day well by telling Eve that in the morning. They were the letters of a youth in love for the first time in his life … and he had fifteen grandchildren. “So wonderful when you think of that old, old man” had not expressed it at all. They were wonderful for anybody . Page after page, all breathing out the way things shine when the sense of someone who is not there, is there all the time.