Mrs Clayton Vernon always enunciated her remarks in a loud and clear voice, so that Paul Ford could not have failed to hear every word.  A faint but beatific smile concealed itself roguishly about Paul Ford’s mouth, and he looked with a rapt expression on an advertisement above Mrs Clayton Vernon’s head, which assured him that, with a certain soap, washing-day became a pleasure.

Thomas Chadwick might have flung the threepenny bit into the road.  He might have gone off into language unseemly in a tram-conductor and a grandfather.  He might have snatched Mrs Clayton Vernon’s bonnet off and stamped on it.  He might have killed Paul Ford (for it was certainly Paul Ford with whom he was the most angry).  But he did none of these things.  He said, in his best unctuous voice: 

“Thank you, m’m, I’m sure!”

And, at the journey’s end, when the passengers descended, he stared a harsh stare, without winking, full in the face of Paul Ford, and he courteously came to the aid of Mrs Clayton Vernon.  He had proclaimed Mrs Clayton Vernon to be his ideal of a true lady, and he was heroically loyal to his ideal, a martyr to the cause he had espoused.  Such a man was not fitted to be a tram-conductor, and the Five Towns Electric Traction Company soon discovered his unfitness—­so that he was again thrown upon the world.

UNDER THE CLOCK

I

It was one of those swift and violent marriages which occur when the interested parties are so severely wounded by the arrow of love that only immediate and constant mutual nursing will save them from a fatal issue. (So they think.) Hence when Annie came from Sneyd to inhabit the house in Birches Street, Hanbridge, which William Henry Brachett had furnished for her, she really knew very little of William Henry save that he was intensely lovable, and that she was intensely in love with him.  Their acquaintance extended over three months; And she knew equally little of the manners and customs of the Five Towns.  For although Sneyd lies but a few miles from the immense seat of pottery manufacture, it is not as the Five Towns are.  It is not feverish, grimy, rude, strenuous, Bacchic, and wicked.  It is a model village, presided over by the Countess of Chell.  The people of the Five Towns go there on Thursday afternoons (eightpence, third class return), as if they were going to Paradise.  Thus, indeed, it was that William Henry had met Annie, daughter of a house over whose door were writ the inviting words, “Tea and Hot Water Provided.”