I just asked her what she was going to do about the rent-collecting." Standing up in front of Hilda, but on his own side of the desk, Mr.
Cannon smiled as a conqueror who can recount a triumph with pride, but without conceit.

She looked at him with naive admiration.

To admire him was agreeable to her; and she liked also to feel unimportant in his presence.

But she fought, unsuccessfully, against the humiliating idea that his personal smartness convicted her of being shabby--of being even inefficient in one department of her existence; and she could have wished to be magnificently dressed.
"Mrs.Lessways is a very shrewd lady--very shrewd indeed!" said Mr.
Cannon, with a smile, this time, to indicate humorously that Mrs.
Lessways was not so easy to handle as might be imagined, and that even the cleverest must mind their p's and q's with such a lady.
"Oh yes, she _is_!" Hilda agreed, with an exaggerated emphasis that showed a lack of conviction.

Indeed, she had never thought of her mother as a _very_ shrewd lady.
Mr.Cannon continued to smile in silence upon the shrewdness of Mrs.
Lessways, giving little appreciative movements of the diaphragm, drawing in his lips and by consequence pushing out his cheeks like a child's; and his eyes were all the time saying lightly: "Still, I managed her!" And while this pleasant intimate silence persisted, the noises of the market-place made themselves prominent, quite agreeably--in particular the hard metallic stamping and slipping, on the bricked pavement under the window, of a team of cart-horses that were being turned in a space too small for their grand, free movements, and the good-humoured cracking of a whip.