So Jack was a mystery, in a manner of speaking. He bought himself a horse,
and a good one, and was very fond of riding round about over the moor and
joining in a meet of foxhounds sometimes; but that was his only pleasure;
and his mother, when a woman here and there asked if her son was minded to
wed, would answer that she'd never heard him unfold his feelings on that
matter, and reckoned he'd got no intentions towards the women.
"He's so much impressed by his own ugliness," Mary Cobley would tell them,
"that he never would rise to the thought of axing a female to take him;
though I tell the man that the better sort of woman ain't prone to pick a
husband, like a bird picks a cherry, for the outside."
Which was true, of course, for modesty might be said to be Jack's strong
suit, and he couldn't abear the thought of inflicting his ugly mug on a
nice young woman, which was the only sort of woman he felt he'd got any
use for.
Then, after he'd been home six months, he found his parent in tears one
night, and she explained the fatal situation that had arose with respect
to her neighbour, Mrs. Pedlar.
"Poor Jane be up against it," she said. "Things have come to a climax in
that quarter at last and, by all accounts, she's got to leave her lifelong
home. And God judge Nicholas Bewes, for he's doing a thing that will put
him on the wrong side of the Books.
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