There are some women whose calm, enigmatic faces seem always to suggest the infinite.  It is given to few to know them, so rare as they are, and their lives usually so withdrawn; but sometimes they pass in the street, or sit like sphinxes in the church or the theatre, and then the memory of their features, persistently recurring, troubles us for days.  They are peculiar to no class, these women:  you may find them in a print gown or in diamonds.  Often they have thin, rather long lips and deep rounded chins; but it is the fine upward curve of the nostrils and the fall of the eyelids which most surely mark them.  Their glances and their faint smiles are beneficent, yet with a subtle shade of half-malicious superiority.  When they look at you from under those apparently fatigued eyelids, you feel that they have an inward and concealed existence far beyond the ordinary—­that they are aware of many things which you can never know.  It is as though their souls, during former incarnations, had trafficked with the secret forces of nature, and so acquired a mysterious and nameless quality above all the transient attributes of beauty, wit, and talent.  They exist:  that is enough; that is their genius.  Whether they control, or are at the mercy of, those secret forces; whether they have in fact learnt, but may not speak, the true answer to the eternal Why; whether they are not perhaps a riddle even to their own simple selves:  these are points which can never be decided.

Everyone who knew Mary Beechinor, in her cousin’s home, or at chapel, or on Titus Price’s earthenware manufactory, where she worked, said or thought that ‘there was something about her ...’ and left the phrase unachieved.  She was twenty-five, and she had lived under the same roof with Edward Beechinor for seven years, since the sudden death of her parents.  The arrangement then made was that Edward should keep her, while she conducted his household.  She had insisted on permission to follow her own occupation, and in order that she might be at liberty to do so she personally paid eighteenpence a week to a little girl who came in to perform sundry necessary duties every day at noon.  Mary Beechinor was a paintress by trade.  As a class the paintresses of the Five Towns are somewhat similar to the more famous mill-girls of Lancashire and Yorkshire—­fiercely independent by reason of good wages earned, loving finery and brilliant colours, loud-tongued and aggressive, perhaps, and for the rest neither more nor less kindly, passionate, faithful, than any other Saxon women anywhere.  The paintresses, however, have some slight advantage over the mill-girls in the outward reticences of demeanour, due no doubt to the fact that their ancient craft demands a higher skill, and is pursued under more humane and tranquil conditions.  Mary Beechinor worked in the ‘band-and-line’ department of the painting-shop at Price’s.  You may have observed the geometrical exactitude of the broad and thin coloured