In spite of her desolated heart, and of her primness, Rachel stepped forward airily.  She was going forth to an enormous event, namely, her first apparition in the shopping streets of the town on a Saturday morning as Mrs. Louis Fores, married woman.  She might have postponed it, but into what future?  Moreover, she was ashamed of being diffident about it.  And, in the peculiar condition of her mind, she would have been ashamed to let a spiritual crisis, however appalling, interfere with the natural, obvious course of her duties.  So far as the world was concerned, she was a happy married woman, who had to make her debut as a shopping housewife, and hence she was determined that her debut should be made....  And yet, possibly she might not have ventured away from the house at all, had she not felt that if she did not escape for a time from its unbreathable atmosphere into the liberty of the streets, she would stifle and expire.  Wherever she put herself in the house she could not feel alone.  In the streets she felt alone, even when saluting new acquaintances and being examined and probed by their critical stare.  The sight of these acquaintances reminded her that she had a long list of calls to repay.  And then the system of paying calls and repaying, and the whole system of society, seemed monstrously fanciful and unreal to her.  There was only one reality.  The solid bricks of the pavement suddenly trembled under her feet as though she were passing over a suspension-bridge.  The enterprise of shopping became idiotic, humorous, incredibly silly in the face of that reality.

Nevertheless, the social system of Bursley, as exemplified in Wedgwood Street and the market-place, its principal shopping thoroughfares, was extremely alluring, bright, and invigorating that morning.  It almost intoxicated, and had, indeed, a similar effect to that of a sparkling drink.  Rachel had never shopped at large with her own money before.  She had executed commissions for Mrs. Maldon.  She had been an unpaid housekeeper to her father and brother.  Now she was shopping as mistress of a house and of money.  She owed an account of her outlay to nobody, not even to Louis.  She recalled the humble and fantastic Saturday night when she had shopped with Louis as reticule-carrier ... centuries since.  The swiftness and unforeseeableness of events frightened the girl masquerading as a wise, perfected woman.  Her heart lay like a weight in her corsage for an instant, and the next instant she was in the bright system again, because she was so young.

Here and there in the streets, and in small groups in the chief shops, you saw prim ladies of every age, each with a gloved hand clasped over a purse. (But sometimes the purse lay safe under the coverlet of a perambulator.) These purses made all the ladies equal, for their contents were absolutely secret from all save the owners.  All the ladies were spending, and the delight of spending was theirs.  And in