Sentence The Fivehundredandsixtyseventh

And, right enough, the new Hamish MacDonald – and his young wife certainly knew that he was a new man, and she liked him better than the old one she had been living with for the past two years, since shortly after his first wife of twenty years had died in tragic circumstances, falling out of an

upstairs window while trying to dislodge a spider's web on the outside, but, as they say in the romantic novels she enjoyed, every cloud has a silver lining and there was no question but that Hamish's unexpected fortune, in the form of an insurance policy his wife had taken out several months before (oh, there was nothing suspicious, they were both insured for a large sum and were each the beneficiary of the other, but he had never expected to collect on hers, and so soon, and when he said this to the Agent, he shed a tear) which had enabled him to make 'an honest woman' of Jessie, with whom he been having a dalliance for two years, ever since the day after she started working for him as a Hoffman Presser (or "Hauf Moon Presser" as she told her best friend, Sadie) and indeed, the

syncretism she perceived in his struggles to reconcile his strongly and sincerely held religious beliefs with the pleasure he took in entering her in the back shop after the other workers had left for the day (her own shift overlapped, because she could only press finished garments, or so she told her parents) and she now thought of her relationship with Hamish as forming a kind of triptych: there were the two years when she was submitting to the puissance of an employer towards a lowly employee who badly needed the job and was constrained to accept his use of her out of economic necessity (and she did, as she admitted to Sadie on the strictest of strict QTs, rather enjoy him thrusting inside her, and

then thrusting a little extra into her pay-packet on a Friday after he'd given her something hard for the weekend); and then there were the two years since they had married, when she did rather feel his prowess diminishing, though he still exerted his puissance as a Husband and Master, though with less vigour than before (and, she confessed to Sadie, she was rather inclining to suspect that he had maybe

"fund hissel anither Hauf Moon Presser tae dally wi," although she had no evidence other than the quickness of his intercourse with her, on the less regular occasions than she had hitherto been used, and the speed with which he succumbed to sleep afterwards); and now there was the newly invigorated and exceedingly randy Hamish, who didn't seem to get enough of her and who (as she breathlessly related to Sadie) could keep at it all night, bucking like a Bronco, till dawn, and still be

able to rise and shine before he left for work, so that it was she who found herself dozing off during the day, to catch up on enough sleep to be able to last the all-night sessions her husband - with a harder and stronger puissance than (she told Sadie) she had never even imagined or believed possible ("kin a man's thingy suddenly get muckle bigger an herder than it ever wis afore?" – she enquired but poor Sadie was speechless with envy, "an dae ye ken?" she asked, "thurr's no ane opprobrious remerk aboot ma cookin noo, and he used tae be aye complainin that it wisnae a patch on the furst Mrs MacDonald's, and that's whit he aye cried hur, but no a wurd aboot hur noo, it's like she never existed fur him, which is okay by me!" and Sadie poured her another wee gin) and though she had led a

generally blameless life before becoming Mr MacDonald's Hoffman Presser, it isn't always right to generalise, but suffice it to say she was no innocent virgin when she first entered his back shop nor when he first entered hers!