Explore "The Pink Shop" by Fergus Hume on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It certainly was not an easy task to come to a conclusion about Miss Pearl. Ralph took her for a beautiful, amiable, stupid woman, narrowed by her early training into a perfect specimen of what a wife should be -- that is, a wife to an ordinary British Philistine. But Sir Joseph was not a prim, conventional man after the style of a suburban clerk, but a clever individual who knew how to use his brains. He might certainly admire Miss Pearl for her calm maternal beauty, but Shawe was satisfied that he could not possibly tolerate such a milk-and-water character. Miss Pearl was more suitable to be the wife of a Sunday-school teacher than the second Lady Branwin.
And this consideration brought the barrister round to wonder if Miss Pearl had not been playing a very clever game with him. He had been with her for quite an hour, and all the time she had been so taken up with telling him about herself that he had not been able to cross-examine her. In a dexterous manner she had contrived to keep him at arm's length, and he left the quiet Bloomsbury house about as wise as when he entered it.