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sed, and spoke between his teeth in an earnest confidential tone.
"You been flapping your mouth about me, I'm told," he said.
Mr. Polly felt suddenly spiritless. "Not that I know of," he answered.
"Not that you know of, be blowed! You been flapping your mouth."
"Don't see it," said Mr. Polly.
"Don't see it, be blowed! You go flapping your silly mouth about me and I'll give you a poke in the eye. See?"
Mr. Hinks regarded the effect of this coldly but firmly, and spat again.
"Understand me?" he enquired.
"Don't recollect," began Mr. Polly.
"Don't recollect, be blowed! You flap your mouth a dam sight too much. This place gets more of your mouth than it wants.... Seen this?"
And Mr. Hinks, having displayed a freckled fist of extraordinary size and pugginess in an ostentatiously familiar manner to Mr. Polly's close inspection by sight and smell, turned it about this way and that and shaken it gently for a moment or so, replaced it carefully in his pocket as if for future use, receded slowly and watchfully for a pace, and then turned away as if to other matters, and ceased to be even in outward seeming a friend....
VI
Mr. Polly's intercourse with all his fellow tradesmen was tarnished sooner or later by some such adverse incident, until not a friend remained to him, and loneliness made even the shop door terrible. Shops bankrupted all about him and fresh people came and new acquaintances sprang up, but sooner or later a discord was inevitable, the tension under which these badly fed, poorly housed, bored and bothered neighbours lived, made it inevitable. The mere fact that Mr. Polly had to see them every day, that there was no getting away from them, was in itself sufficient to make them almost unendurable to his frettingly active mind.
Among other shopkeepers in the High Street there was Chuffles, the grocer, a small, hairy, silently intent polygamist, who was given rough music by the youth of the neighbourhood because of a scan