Never, never would he have
guessed, even in the wildest surmise, that Mary and her husband and
child would sleep at the Tiger! The thought unmanned him. What! A baby
at the Tiger!
Let it not be imagined for a moment that the Tiger is not an utterly
respectable hotel. It is, always was, always will be. Not the faintest
slur had ever been cast upon its licence. Still, it had a bar and a
barmaid, and indubitably people drank at the bar. When a prominent man
took to drink (as prominent men sometimes did), people would say, "He's
always nipping into the Tiger!" Or, "You'll see him at the Tiger before
eleven o'clock in the morning!" Hence to Samuel Peel, total abstainer
and temperance reformer, the Tiger, despite its vast respectability and
the reputation of its eighteen-penny ordinary, was a place of sin, a
place of contamination; briefly, a "gin palace," if not a
"gaming-saloon." On principle, Samuel Peel (as his niece suspected) had
never set foot in the Tiger. The thought that his great-nephew and his
niece had actually slept there horrified him.
And further and worse; what would people say about Samuel Peel's
relatives having to stop at the Tiger, while Samuel Peel's large house
up at Hillport was practically empty? Would they not deduce family
quarrels, feuds, scandals? The situation was appalling.
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