Eva occupied a small room opening off the principal showroom, and during hours of work she issued thence but seldom.  Only customers of the highest importance might speak with her.  She was a power felt rather than seen.  Employes who knocked at her door always did so with a certain awe of what awaited them on the other side, and a consciousness that the moment was unsuitable for levity.  ‘If you please, Miss Eva——­’.  Here she gave audience to the ‘buyers’ and window-dressers, listened to complaints and excuses, and occasionally had a secret orgy of afternoon tea with one or two of her friends.  None but these few girls—­mostly younger than herself, and remarkable only in that their dislike of the snobbery of the Five Towns, though less fiercely displayed, agreed with her own—­really knew Eva.  To them alone did she unveil herself, and by them she was idolized.

‘She is simply splendid when you know her—­such a jolly girl!’ they would say to other people; but other people, especially other women, could not believe it.  They fearfully respected her because she was very well dressed and had quantities of money.  But they called her ’a curious creature’; it was inconceivable to them that she should choose to work in a shop; and her tongue had a causticity which was sometimes exceedingly disconcerting and mortifying.  As for men, she was shy of them, and, moreover, she loathed the elaborate and insincere ritual of deference which the average man practises towards women unrelated to him, particularly when they are young and rich.  Her father she adored, without knowing it; for he often angered her, and humiliated her in private.  As for the rest, she was, after all, only six-and-twenty.

‘If you don’t mind, I should like to walk along with you,’ Clive Timmis said to her one Sunday evening in the porch of the Bethesda Chapel.

‘I shall be glad,’ she answered at once; ’father isn’t here, and I’m all alone.’

Ezra Brunt was indeed seldom there, counting in the matter of attendance at chapel among what were called ‘the weaker brethren.’

‘I am going over to Oldcastle,’ Clive explained calmly.

So began the formal courtship—­more than a month after Clive had settled in Machin Street, for he was far too discreet to engender by precipitancy any suspicion in the haunts of scandal that his true reason for establishing himself in his uncle’s household was a certain rich young woman who was to be found every day next door.  Guided as much by instinct as by tact, Clive approached Eva with an almost savage simplicity and naturalness of manner, ignoring not only her father’s wealth, but all the feigned punctilio of a wooer.  His face said:  ’Let there be no beating about the bush—­I like you.’  Hers answered:  ’Good! we will see.’