Chapter 7

Elizabeth-Jane and her mother had arrived some twenty
minutes earlier. Outside the house they had stood and
considered whether even this homely place, though
recommended as moderate, might not be too serious in its
prices for their light pockets. Finally, however, they had
found courage to enter, and duly met Stannidge the landlord,
a silent man, who drew and carried frothing measures to this
room and to that, shoulder to shoulder with his waiting-
maids--a stately slowness, however, entering into his
ministrations by contrast with theirs, as became one whose
service was somewhat optional. It would have been
altogether optional but for the orders of the landlady, a
person who sat in the bar, corporeally motionless, but with
a flitting eye and quick ear, with which she observed and
heard through the open door and hatchway the pressing needs
of customers whom her husband overlooked though close at
hand. Elizabeth and her mother were passively accepted as
sojourners, and shown to a small bedroom under one of the
gables, where they sat down.

The principle of the inn seemed to be to compensate for the
antique awkwardness, crookedness, and obscurity of the
passages, floors, and windows, by quantities of clean linen
spread about everywhere, and this had a dazzling effect upon
the travellers.

"'Tis too good for us--we can't meet it!" said the elder
woman, looking round the apartment with misgiving as soon as
they were left alone.

"I fear it is, too," said Elizabeth. "But we must be
respectable."

"We must pay our way even before we must be respectable,"
replied her mother. "Mr. Henchard is too high for us to
make ourselves known to him, I much fear; so we've only our
own pockets to depend on."

"I know what I'll do," said Elizabeth-Jane after an interval
of waiting, during which their needs seemed quite forgotten
under the press of business below. And leaving the room,
she descended the stairs and penetrated to the bar.

If there was one good thing more than another which
characterized this single-hearted girl it was a willingness
to sacrifice her personal comfort and dignity to the common
weal.

"As you seem busy here to-night, and mother's not well off,
might I take out part of our accommodation by helping?" she
asked of the landlady.

The latter, who remained as fixed in the arm-chair as if she
had been melted into it when in a liquid state, and could
not now be unstuck, looked the girl up and down inquiringly,
with her hands on the chair-arms. Such arrangements as the
one Elizabeth proposed were not uncommon in country
villages; but, though Casterbridge was old-fashioned, the
custom was well-nigh obsolete here. The