So that arrangements of mutual obligation had to be made: the good woman from whom Mrs Jones had bought her tomatoes would take charge of the spring chickens Mrs Jones had bought from another good woman just as soon as not, and deliver them at Mrs Jones's residence, as under any circumstances she was "going round that way." It was a scene of activity but not of excitement, or in any sense of joy.

The matter was too hard an importance; it made too much difference on both sides whether potatoes were twelve or fifteen cents a peck.
The dealers were laconic and the buyers anxious; country neighbours exchanged the time of day, but under the pressure of affairs.

Now and then a lady of Elgin stopped to gossip with another; the countrywomen looked on, curious, grim, and a little contemptuous of so much demonstration and so many words.

Life on an Elgin market day was a serious presentment even when the sun shone, and at times when it rained or snowed the aesthetic seemed a wholly unjustifiable point of view.
It was not misery, it was even a difficult kind of prosperity, but the margin was small and the struggle plain.

Plain, too, it was that here was no enterprise of yesterday, no fresh broken ground of dramatic promise, but a narrow inheritance of the opportunity to live which generations had grasped before.