She moved up one in the queue and went on thinking. Suppose he had married again… Something pricked her sharply. She bit her lip. No-she would have heard, she would have been told, warned… Would she? would she? Her head came up, lips parted, breath quickened. No, she couldn’t reckon on that, she couldn’t reckon on anything. But all the same she didn’t think that Philip would have married again. She shook her head slowly. She didn’t think he would. He had the money, he had the place, and she didn’t think he’d be in too much of a hurry to tie himself up again. After all, it hadn’t gone too well, and once bitten twice shy. A faint smile just touched her lips. She didn’t think Philip was going to react very pleasurably to the idea that he was still a married man.
There were three people in front of her-a very stout woman with a basket full of shopping, a little dowdy creature with a string bag, and a stooping elderly man. The stout woman was explaining at the greatest possible length how she had come to lose her ration card. “And I’m not one to do that in a general way, Miss Marsh, though I suppose there’s nobody that doesn’t lose things sometimes, and I don’t set up to be better than anyone else, but many’s the time my husband’s said, ‘Give it to Mother-she’s as safe as a church.’ So I don’t know what come over me, but put it down somewhere I must of, for when I got home there was Father’s, and Ernie’s and Carrie’s, and my sister-in-law’s that’s on a visit, but as for mine I might never have had one. So I went back and round to all the shops where I’d been, and there wasn’t nobody had seen it…”