Cranford

After Dinner

After dinner the company retires to the counting-house, which the servant-girl has cleaned in their absence. Miss Matty softly confesses how pleasant it is to dine with a bachelor, though she hopes it is not improper, while Miss Pole inspects the dusty books and worries that her cousin has grown uncouth in his solitary habits. Miss Matty defends him as eccentric, observing that very clever people always are.

Miss Matty and the Pipe

Following dinner, a clay pipe and spittoon are produced, and Mr Holbrook asks the ladies to withdraw if they dislike tobacco-smoke. As a relic of old-fashioned courtesy, he presents the pipe to Miss Matty and asks her to fill the bowl—a compliment that both shocks her refinement, trained by Deborah to abhor all smoking, and gratifies her feelings at being singled out. She delicately stuffs the tobacco into the pipe before they withdraw.

The Walk Through the Fields

Mr Holbrook proposes a walk in the fields, but the two elder ladies, fearing damp and dirt and lacking suitable calashes, decline. The narrator accompanies him on a turn to check on his men; he strides along either oblivious of her or soothed by his pipe, occasionally breaking into grand sonorous quotations triggered by trees, clouds, or distant pastures. At an old cedar tree near the house he pauses to admire Tennyson’s phrase “layers of shade,” and proceeds to praise the poet.

Ash-Buds in March

Still excited by his rediscovery of Tennyson, Mr Holbrook suddenly demands of the narrator what colour ash-buds are in March. Stumped, she admits ignorance, and he triumphantly recalls the line “black as ash-buds in March,” reproaching himself for living all his life in the country without knowing. He strides off again, swinging along to the music of some rhyme he has captured.