Martha flashed a resentful glance which, however, Bundock took for but another thrust at Caleb’s obstinate hat. “I don’t want a new bonnet,” she cried indignantly. “It needn’t be new,” said Bundock helpfully. “Just have your old bonnet whitened. That’s on her bill-paper: ‘Bonnets Bleached As Good As New.’” “That’s a good notion,” said Caleb. “You don’t want it bran-span-new. Posty’ll tell her to come over here to get your old boarnt and then we’ll spring Cousin Caroline’s letter on her for her to read!” He chuckled. Bundock chuckled too, swelling at the adoption of his advice. “And now that I’ve stopped gammicking so long, I may as well sample that cowslip wine, Mrs. Flynt,” he observed graciously. But Martha had vanished. VII Miss Gentry had apartments in one of the most elegant cottages to be found in Little Bradmarsh. Protected by palings, it stood all alone on the high road, painted a vivid green, with three pollarded lime-trees in front like sentinel mops. At the base of the trim little garden the front door rose above two wooden steps with a little porch and ostentated a brass plate with the inscription: MISS GENTRY LATE OF COLCHESTER PRACTICAL DRESSMAKER AND MILLINER. In proof of which, from the cottage window, whose green shutters lay folded back, a _visite_ or jacket of black silk, and a polka jacket, and a trio of straw bonnets, Tuscan or Leghorn, appealed to the passing eye: one of them a bonnet cap with a quilting of net and broad blue strings, another resplendent with purple ribbons and the new-treated straw plait that the Queen and Mrs. Mawhood favoured, and the third of drawn silk on little wires. The pictures of the period with a wonderful unanimity and monotony display a single style of bonnet, but artists in those days were men, and Miss Gentry could have told you better. “I’ve looked down from a pew in the gallery of my Colchester Church on Easter Sunday,” she told Jinny once, “and tried in vain to find two fellow-bonnets.” But her professional door with its immaculate paint and shining brass was so forbiddingly respectable that clients mostly preferred to seek access through her landlady’s back door, where the flutter of washing from the clothes-line on its green square poles in the little orchard was reassuring; not to mention her chickens.