“Of course they haven’t,” said Helen.  “Why, mother is the most generous old thing you can possibly imagine.  She’s left all her own income to me.”

“How much?”

“Well, it comes to rather over thirty shillings a week.”

“And can’t a single woman live on thirty shillings a wik?  Bless us!  I don’t spend thirty shillings a wik myself.”

Helen raised her chin.  “A single woman can live on thirty shillings a week,” she said.  “But what about her frocks?”

“Well, what about her frocks?” he repeated.

“Well,” she said, “I like frocks.  It just happens that I can’t do without frocks.  It’s just frocks that I work for; I spend nearly all I earn on them.”  And her eyes, descending, seemed to say:  “Look at the present example.”

“Seventy pounds a year on ye clothes!  Ye’re not serious, lass?”

She looked at him coldly.  “I am serious,” she said.

Experienced as he was, he had never come across a fact so incredible as this fact.  And the compulsion of believing it occupied his forces to such an extent that he had no force left to be wise.  He did not observe the icy, darting challenge in her eye, and he ignored the danger in her voice.

“All as I can say is you ought to be ashamed o’ yourself, lass!” he said, sharply.  The reflection was blown out of him by the expansion of his feelings.  Seventy pounds a year on clothes!...  He too was serious.

Now, James Ollerenshaw was not the first person whom Helen’s passion for clothes had driven into indiscretions.  Her mother, for example, had done battle with that passion, and had been defeated with heavy loss.  A head-mistress and a chairman of a School Board (a pompous coward) had also suffered severely.  And though Helen had been the victor, she had not won without some injury to her nerves.  Her campaigns and conquests had left her, on this matter, “touchy”—­as the word is used in the Five Towns.

“I shall be very much obliged if you will not speak to me in that tone,” said she.  “Because I cannot permit it either from you or any other man.  When I venture to criticise your private life I shall expect you to criticise mine—­and not before.  I don’t want to be rude, but I hope you understand, great-stepuncle.”

The milk was within the twentieth of an inch of the brim.  James Ollerenshaw blushed as red as Helen herself had blushed at the beginning of their acquaintance.  A girl, the daughter of the chit Susan, to address him so!  She had the incomparable insolence of her mother.  Yes, thirty years ago Susan had been just as rude to him.  But he was thirty years younger then; he was not a sage of sixty then.  He continued to blush.  He was raging.  Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to assert that his health was momentarily in peril.  He glanced for an instant at Helen, and saw that her nostrils were twitching.  Then he looked hurriedly away, and rose.  The captain of the bowling club excusably assumed that James was at length going to attack the serious business of the day.