Perhaps it is a mercy we can’t see ourselves as others see us. Molly Wickham was a remarkable pretty woman in days gone by; maybe she is wiser since she has aged, but when she was young she was foolish. She never seemed to realize it, but I wasn’t deceived.  
So said the cattle-dealer, a healthy looking man, massive, morose, and bordering on fifty. He did not say it to anybody in particular, for it was said—it was to himself he said it—privately, musingly, as if to soothe the still embittered recollection of a beauty that was foolish, a fondness that was vain.
 
Ted Wickham himself was silly, too, when he married her. Must have been extraordinarily touched to marry a little soft, religious, teetotal party like her, and him a great sporting cock of a man, just come into a public-house business that his aunt had left him, “The Half Moon,” up on the Bath Road. He always ate like an elephant, but she’d only the appetite of a scorpion. And what was worse, he was a true blood conservative while all her family were a set of radicals that you couldn’t talk sense to: if you only so much as mentioned the name of Gladstone they would turn their eyes up to the ceiling as if he was a saint in glory. Blood is thicker than water, I know, but it’s unnatural stuff to drink so much of. Grant their name was. They christened her Pamela, and as if that wasn’t cruel enough they messed her initials up by giving her the middle name of Isabel.
 
But she was a handsome creature, on the small side196 but sound as a roach and sweet as an apple tree in bloom. Pretty enough to convert Ted, and I thought she would convert him, but she was a cussed woman—never did what you would expect of her—and so she didn’t even try. She gave up religion herself, gave it up altogether and went to church no more. That was against her inclination, but of course it was only right, for Ted never could have put up with that. Wedlock’s one thing and religion’s two: that’s odd and even: a little is all very well if it don’t go a long ways. Parson Twamley kept calling on her for a year or two afterwards, trying to persuade her to return to the fold—he couldn’t have called oftener if she had owed him a hundred pound—but she would not hear of it, she would not go. He was not much of a parson, not one to wake anybody up, but he had a good delivery, and when he’d the luck to get hold of a sermon of any sense his delivery was very good, very good indeed. She would say: “No, sir, my feelings aren’t changed one bit, but I won’t come to church any more, I’ve my private reasons.” And the parson would glare across at old Ted as if he were a Belzeboob, for Ted always sat and listened to the parson chattering to her. Never said a word himself, always kept his pipe stuck in his jaw. Ted never persuaded her in the least, just left it to her, and she would come round to his manner of thinking in the end, for though he never actually said it, she always knew what his way of thinking was. A strange thing, it takes a real woman to do that, silly or no! At election times she would plaster the place all over with tory bills, do it with her own hands!
 
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Still, there’s no stability in meekness of that sort, a weathervane can only go with wind and weather, and there was no sense in her giving in to Ted as she did, not in the long run, for he couldn’t help but despise her. A man wants something or other to whet the edge of his life on; and he did despise her, I know.
 
But she was a fine creature in her way, only her way wasn’t his. A beautiful woman, too, well-limbered up, with lovely hair, but always a very proper sort, a milksop—Ted told me once that he had never seen her naked. Well, can you wonder at the man? And always badgering him to do things that could not be done at the time. To have “The Half Moon” painted, or enlarged, or insured: she’d keep on badgering him, and he could not make her see that any god’s amount of money spent on paint wouldn’t improve the taste of liquor.
 
“I can see as far into a quart pot as the King of England,” he says, “and I know that if this bar was four times as big as ’tis a quart wouldn’t hold a drop more then than it does now.”
 
“No, of course,” she says.
 
“Nor a drop less neither,” says Ted. He showed her that all the money expended on improvements and insurance and such things were so much off something else. Ted was a generous chap—liked to see plenty of everything, even though he had to give some of it away. But you can’t make some women see some things.
 
“Not a roof to our heads, nor a floor to our feet, nor a pound to turn round on if a fire broke out,” Molly would say.
 
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“But why should a fire break out?” he’d ask her. “There never has been a fire here, there never ought to be a fire here, and what’s more, there never will be a fire here, so why should there be a fire?”
 
And of course she let him have his own way, and they never had a fire there while he was alive, though I don’t know that any great harm would have been done anyways, for after a few years trade began to slacken off, and the place got dull, and what with the taxes it was not much more than a bread and cheese business. Still, there’s no matter of that: a man don’t ask for a bed of roses: a world without some disturbance or anxiety would be like a duckpond where the ducks sleep all day and are carried off at night by the foxes.
 
Molly was like that in many things, not really contrary, but no tact. After Ted died she kept on at “The Half Moon” for a year or two by herself, and regular as clockwork every month Pollock, the insurance manager, would drop in and try for to persuade her to insure the house or the stock or the furniture, any mortal thing. Well, believe you, when she had only got herself to please in the matter that woman wouldn’t have anything to say to that insurance—she never did insure, and never would.
 
“I wouldn’t run such a risk; upon my soul it’s flying in the face of possibilities, Mrs. Wickham”—he was a palavering chap, that Pollock; a tall fellow with sandy hair, and he always stunk of liniment for he had asthma on the chest—“A very grave risk, it is indeed,” he would say,199 “the Meazer’s family was burnt clean out of hearth and home last St. Valentine’s day, and if they hadn’t taken up a policy what would have become of those Meazers?”
 
“I dunno,” Molly says—that was the name Ted give her—“I dunno, and I’m sorry for unfortunate people, but I’ve my private reasons.”
 
She was always talking about her private reasons, and they must have been devilish private, for not a soul on God’s earth ever set eyes on them.
 
“Well, Mrs. Wickham,” says Pollock, “they’d have been a tidy ways up Queer Street, and ruin’s a long-lasting affair,” Pollock says. He was a rare palavering chap, and he used to talk about Gladstone, too, for he knew her family history; but that didn’t move her, and she did not insure.
 
“Yes, I quite agree,” she says, “but I’ve my private reasons.”
 
Sheer female cussedness! But where her own husband couldn’t persuade her Pollock had no chance at all. And then, of course, two years after Ted died she did go and have a fire there. “The Half Moon” was burnt clean out, rafter and railings, and she had to give it up and shift into the little bullseye business where she is now, selling bullseyes to infants and ginger beer to boy scholars on bicycles. And what does it all amount to? Why, it don’t keep her in hairpins. She had the most beautiful hair once. But that’s telling the story back foremost.
 
Ted was a smart chap, a particular friend of mine (so was Molly), and he could have made something of himself and of his business, perhaps, if it hadn’t been for her. He was a sportsman to the backbone; cricket, shooting, fishing, always game for a bit of200 life, any mortal thing—what was there he couldn’t do?............