`Put it on, put it on,' said the other.
`Call wine, wine and finish there.' With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand
upon the joker's dress, such as it was--quite deliberately, as having dirtied
the hand on his account; and then re-crossed the road and entered the
wine-shop.
This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked',
martial-looking man of thirty, and he should have bean of a hot temperament,
for, although it was a bitter day, he wore no coat, but carried one slung over
his shoulder. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and his brown arms were
bare to the elbows. Neither did he wear anything more on his head than his own
crisply-curling short dark hair. He was a dark man altogether, with good eyes
and a good bold breadth between them. Good-humoured looking on the whole, but
implacable-looking, too; evidently a man of a strong resolution and a set
purpose; a man not desirable to be met, rushing down a narrow pass with a gulf
on either side, for nothing would turn the man.
Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop
behind the counter as he came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his
own age, with a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large
hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of
manner. There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might have
predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the
reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being sensitive to cold, was
wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright shawl twined about her head,
though not to the concealment of her large earrings. Her knitting was before
her, but she had laid it down to pick her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged,
with her right elbow supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing
when her lord came in, but coughed Just one grain of cough. This, in combination
with the lifting of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by the
breadth of a line, suggested to her husband that he would do well to look round
the shop among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while he
stepped over the way.
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