Kipps, page 259 by H.G. Wells
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e of the condescending sales-woman.
'Artie,' said Ann, 'you didn't ought to 'ave--'
That was all. And, you know, the hat didn't suit Ann a bit. Her clothes did not suit her at all. The simple, cheap, clean brightness of her former style had given place not only to this hat, but to several other things in the same key. And out from among these things looked her pretty face, the face of a wise little child--an artless wonder struggling through a preposterous dignity.
They had bought that hat one day when they had gone to see the shops in Bond Street. Kipps had looked at the passers-by, and it had suddenly occurred to him that Ann was dowdy. He had noted the hat of a very proud-looking lady passing in an electric brougham, and had resolved to get Ann the nearest thing to that.
The railway porters perceived some subtle incongruity in Ann, so did the knot of cabmen in the station doorway, the two golfers, and the lady with daughters, who had also got out of the train. And Kipps, a little pale, blowing a little, not in complete possession of himself, knew that they noticed her and him. And Ann--It is hard to say just what Ann observed of these things.
''Ere!' said Kipps to a cabman, and regretted too late a vanished 'H.'
'I got a trunk up there,' he said to a ticket-inspector, 'marked A.K.'
'Ask a porter,' said the inspector, turning his back.
'Demn!' said Kipps, not altogether inaudibly.
2
It is all very well to sit in the sunshine and talk of the house you will have, and another altogether to achieve it. We English --all the world, indeed, to-day--live in a strange atmosphere of neglected great issues, of insistent, triumphant petty things; we are given up to the fine littlenesses of intercourse; table manners and small correctitudes are the substance of our lives. You do not escape these things for long, even by so catastrophic a proceeding as flying to London with a young lady of no wealth and inferior social position. The mists of noble emo