Mrs Moseley assured Abner that Susan was a dear, sweet child, and such a little woman; but he never met her in Mrs Moseley’s presence, for the old lady had decided against the impropriety of Susan and himself together beholding her in bed. Awkward, at first, he found in a little while that she wasn’t as formidable as he imagined, though all his triumphs in the football field could not have given him one half of her staggering self-possession. What impressed him most about her was, without doubt, the sense of personal cleanliness that she carried with her. Susan was on a holiday, and had time for such refinements. She wore clean print dresses, while Alice and her shrill-voiced neighbours in Hackett’s Cottages, by whose appearance Abner had regulated his ideas of feminine nicety, wore, as a rule, the livery of their toil. Susan, on the other hand, lived like a lady, having no better work for her fingers than the braiding of her dark hair. In the mornings she stayed with Mrs Moseley, listening, in a kind of dream, to her aunt’s recitation of the virtues of people whom, in the days before her marriage, she had served. It seemed as if that were the time in her life toward which her thoughts now returned most happily, and the mere scraping together of its unimportant details filled her with a mild afterglow of enjoyment. ‘I remember,’ she would begin, in a weak, contented voice that was soothing in its tiredness, ‘I remember one day Mrs Willis—the first Mrs Willis that is, old Mr Hackett’s daughter down the Holloway and Mr Edward’s mother—I remember her coming into the kitchen with a beautiful basketful of cherries. Fine, black fruit they was! And she says “Hannah”—that’s the Hannah that’s still there, but I expect she’s forgotten _me_—“Hannah,” she says, “look what the master’s sent from the cherry-orchard.” They always call it the cherry-orchard, you know, up above Mawne bank, and that was a wonderful year for cherries. “We’ll make them into jam, Hannah,” she says. “And Liza”—that’s me—“will help you stone them.” _Stone them_, she says! And how we laughed to be sure! I can see her standing there now, a bit red in the face, for she was new to housekeeping and never knew you don’t stone cherries. She had a couple of black-hearts in her lips, like the game you play. A dear lady, she was! I can see her again in Mr Edward. Time passes, doesn’t it? You’ll know that some day, Susan.’