"So I see," said Hilda, meaning that so she smelt. "I just looked in on the chance of seeing Maggie."

"Maggie went out about half-an-hour ago."

Auntie Hamps's expression had grown mysterious. Hilda thought: "What's she hiding from me?"

"Oh, well, it doesn't matter," said she. "You're going out too, Auntie."

"I do wish I'd known you were coming, dear. Will you stay and have a cup of tea?"

"No, no! I won't keep you."

"But it will be a _pleasure_, dear," Auntie Hamps protested warmly.

"No, no! Thanks! I'll just walk along with you a little of the way.

Which direction are you going?"

Auntie Hamps hesitated, she was in a dilemma.

"What _is_ she hiding from me?" thought Hilda.

"The truth is," said Auntie Hamps, "I'm just popping over to Clara's."

"Well, I'll go with you, Auntie."

"Oh, do!" exclaimed Mrs. Hamps almost pa.s.sionately. "Do! I'm sure Clara will be delighted!" She added in a casual tone: "Maggie's there."

Thought Hilda:

"She evidently doesn't want me to go."

After Mrs. Hamps had peered into the grand copper pan and most particularly instructed the servant, they set off.

"I shan't be easy in my mind until I get back," said Auntie Hamps.

"Unless you look after them all the time they always forget to stir it."

II

When they turned in at the gate of the Benbows' house the front-door was already open, and Clara, holding Rupert--her youngest--by the hand, stood smiling to receive them. Obviously they had been descried up the street from one of the bow-windows. This small fact, strengthening in Hilda's mind the gradually-formed notion that the Benbows were always lying in wait and that their existence was a vast machination for getting the better of other people, enlivened her prejudice against her sister-in-law. Moreover Clara was in one of her best dresses, and her glance had a peculiar self-conscious expression, partly guilty and partly cunning. Nevertheless, the fair fragility of Clara's face, with its wonderful skin, and her manner, at once girlish and maternal, of holding fast the child's hand, reacted considerably against Hilda's prejudice.

Rupert was freshly all in white, st.i.tched and embroidered with millions of plain and fancy st.i.tches; he had had time neither to tear nor to stain; only on his bib there was a spot of jam. His obese right arm was stretched straight upwards to attain the immense height of the hand of the protective giantess his mother, and this reaching threw the whole balance of his little body over towards the left, and gave him a comical and wistful appearance. He was a pretty and yet st.u.r.dy child, with a look indicating a nice disposition, and he had recently been acquiring the marvellous gift of speech.... Astounding how the infantile brain added word to word and phrase to phrase, and (as though there were not enough) actually invented delicious words and graphic droll phrases!

n.o.body could be surprised that he became at once the centre of greetings. His grand-aunt s.n.a.t.c.hed him up, and without the slightest repugnance he allowed the ancient woman to bury her nose in his face and neck.

And then Hilda embraced him with not less pleasure, for the contact of his delicate flesh, and his flushed timid smile, were exquisite. She wished for a moment that George was only two and a half again, and that she could bathe him, and wipe him, and nurse him close. Clara's pride, though the visitors almost forgot to shake hands with her, was ecstatic.

At length Rupert was safely on the step once more. He had made no remark whatever. Shyness prevented him from showing off his new marvellous gift, but his mother, gazing at him, said that in ordinary life he never stopped chattering.

"Come this way, will you?" said Clara effusively, and yet conspiratorially, pointing to the drawing-room, which was to the left of the front-door. From the dining-room, which was to the right of the front-door, issued confused sounds. "Albert's here. I'm so glad you've come," she added to Hilda.

Auntie Hamps murmured warningly into Hilda's ear:

"It's Bert's birthday party."

A fortnight earlier Hilda had heard rumours of Bert's approaching birthday--his twelfth, and therefore a high solemnity--but she had very wrongly forgotten about it. "I'm so glad you've come," Clara repeated in the drawing-room. "I was afraid you might be hurt. I thought I'd just bring you in here first and explain it all to you."

"Oh! Bless me!" exclaimed Auntie Hamps,--interrupting, as she glanced round the drawing-room. "We are grand! Well I never! We are grand!"

"Do you like it?" said Clara, blushing.

Auntie Hamps in reply told one of the major lies of her career. She said with rapture that she did like the new drawing-room suite. This suite was a proof, disagreeable to Auntie Hamps, that the world would never stand still. It quite ignored all the old Victorian ideals of furniture; and in ignoring the past, it also ignored the future.

Victorian furniture had always sought after immortality; in Bursley there were thousands of Victorian chairs and tables that defied time and that nothing but an axe or a conflagration could destroy. But this new suite thought not of the morrow; it did not even pretend to think of the morrow. n.o.body believed that it would last, and the owners of it simply forbore to reflect upon what it would be after a few years of family use. They contemplated with joy its first state of dainty freshness, and were content therein. Whereas the old Victorians lived in the future (in so far as they truly lived at all), the neo-Victorians lived careless in the present.

The suite was of apparent rosewood, with salmon-tinted upholstery ending in pleats and bows. But white also entered considerably into the scheme, for enamel paint had just reached Bursley and was destined to become the rage. Among the items of the suite was a three-legged milking-stool in deal covered with white enamel paint heightened by salmon-tinted bows of imitation silk. Society had recently been thunderstruck by the originality of putting a milking-stool in a drawing-room; its quaintness appealed with tremendous force to nearly all hearts; nearly every house-mistress on seeing a milking-stool in a friend's drawing-room, decided that she must have a milking-stool in her drawing-room, and took measures to get one. Clara was among the earlier possessors, the pioneers. Ten years--five years--before, Clara had appropriated the word "aesthetic" as a term of sneering abuse, with but a vague idea of its meaning; and now--such is the miraculous effect of time--she was caught up in the movement as it had ultimately spread to the Five Towns, a willing convert and captive, and nothing could exceed her scorn for that which once she had admired to the exclusion of all else. Into that mid-Victorian respectable house, situate in a rather old-fashioned street leading from Shawport Lane to the Ca.n.a.l, and whose boast (even when inhabited by non-conformists) was that it overlooked the Rectory garden, the new ideals of brightness, freshness, eccentricity, brittleness and impermanency had entered, and Auntie Hamps herself was intimidated by them.

Hilda gave polite but perfunctory praise. Left alone, she might not have been averse from the new ideals in their more expensive forms, but the influence of Edwin had taught her to despise them. Edwin's tastes in furniture, imbibed from the Orgreaves, neglected the modern, and went even further back than earliest Victorian. Much of the ugliness bought by his father remained in the Clayhanger house, but all Edwin's own purchases were either antique, or, if new, careful imitations of the pre-Victorian. Had England been peopled by Edwins, all original artists in furniture might have died of hunger. Yet he encouraged original literature. What, however, put Hilda against Clara's drawing-room suite, was not its style, nor its enamel, nor its frills, nor the obviously inferior quality of its varnish, but the mere fact that it had been exposed for sale in Nixon's shop-window in Duck Bank, with the price marked. Hilda did not like this. Now Edwin might see an old weather-gla.s.s in some frowsy second-hand shop at Hanbridge or Turnhill, and from indecision might leave it in the second-hand shop for months, and then buy it and hang it up at home,--and instantly it was somehow transformed into another weather-gla.s.s, a superior and personal weather-gla.s.s. But Clara's suite was not--for Hilda--thus transformed.

Indeed, as she sat there in Clara's drawing-room, she had the illusion of sitting in Nixon's shop.

Further, Nixon had now got in his window another suite precisely like Clara's. It was astonishing to Hilda that Clara was not ashamed of the publicity and the wholesale reproduction of her suite. But she was not.

On the contrary she seemed to draw a mysterious satisfaction from the very fact that suites precisely similar to hers were to be found or would soon be found in unnumbered other drawing-rooms. Nor did she mind that the price was notorious. And in the matter of the price the phrase "hire-purchase" flitted about in Hilda's brain. She felt sure that Albert Benbow had not paid cash to Nixon. She regarded the hire-purchase system as unrespectable, if not immoral, and this opinion was one of the very few she shared with Auntie Hamps. Both ladies in their hearts, and in the security of their financial positions, blamed the Benbows for imprudence. n.o.body, not even his wife, knew just how Albert "stood," but many took leave to guess--and guessed unfavourably.

"Do sit down," said Clara, too urgently. She was so preoccupied that Hilda's indifference to her new furniture did not affect her.

They all sat down, primly, in the pretty primness of the drawing-room, and Rupert leaned as if tired against his mother's fine skirt.

Hilda, expectant, glanced vaguely about her. Auntie Hamps did the same.

On the central table lay a dictionary of the English language, open and leaves downwards; and near it a piece of paper containing a long list of missing words in pencil. Auntie Hamps, as soon as her gaze fell on these objects, looked quickly away, as though she had by accident met the obscene. Clara caught the movement, flushed somewhat, and recovered herself.

"I'm so glad you've come," she repeated yet again to Hilda, with a sickly-sweet smile. "I did so want to explain to you how it was we didn't ask George--I was afraid you might be vexed."

"What an idea!" Hilda murmured as naturally as she could, her nostrils twitching uneasily in the atmosphere of small feuds and misunderstandings which Clara breathed with such pleasure. She laughed, to rea.s.sure Clara, and also in enjoyment of the thought that for days Clara had pictured her as wondering sensitively why no invitation to the party had come for George, while in fact the party had never crossed her mind. She regretted that she had no gift for Bert, but decided to give him half-a-crown for his savings-bank account, of which she had heard a lot.

"To tell ye the truth," said Clara, launching herself, "we've had a lot of trouble with Bert. Albert's been quite put about. It was only the day before yesterday Albert got out of him the truth about the night of your At Home, Hilda, when he ran away after he'd gone to bed. Albert said to him: 'I shan't whip you, and I shan't put you on bread and water. Only if you don't tell me what you were doing that night there'll be no birthday and no birthday party--that's all.' So at last Bert gave in. And d'you know what he was doing? Holding a prayer-meeting with your George and that boy of Clowes's next door to your house down Hulton Street. Did you know?"

Hilda shook her head bravely. Officially she did not know.

"Did you ever hear of such a thing?" exclaimed Auntie Hamps.

"Yes," proceeded Clara, taking breath for a new start. "And Bert's story is that they prayed for a penknife for your George, and it came.

And then they prayed for a bicycle for our Bert, but the bicycle didn't come, and then Bert and George had a fearful quarrel, and George gave him the penknife--made him have it--and then said he'd never speak to him any more as long as he lived. At first Albert was inclined to thrash Bert for telling lies and being irreverent, but in the end he came to the conclusion that at any rate Bert was telling what he thought to be the truth.... And that Clowes boy is so _little_! ... Bert wanted his birthday party of course, but he begged and prayed us not to ask George. So in the end we decided we'd better not, and we let him have his own way. That's all there is to it.... So George has said nothing?"

"Not a word," replied Hilda.

"And the Clowes boy is so _little_!" said Clara again. She went suddenly to the mantelpiece and picked up a penknife and offered it to Hilda.

"Here's the penknife. Of course Albert took it off him."

"Why?" said Hilda ingenuously.