The basalt clock on the mantelpiece trembled and burst into the song of six.  Clara Curtenty rose swiftly from the easy-chair, and took her seat in front of the tea-tray.  Almost at the same moment a neat black-and-white parlourmaid brought in teapot, copper kettle, and a silver-covered dish containing hot pikelets; then departed.  Clara was alone again; not the same Clara now, but a personage demure, prim, precise, frightfully upright of back—­a sort of impregnable stronghold—­without doubt a Deputy-Mayoress.

At five past six Josiah Curtenty entered the room, radiant from a hot bath, and happy in dry clothes—­a fine, if mature, figure of a man.  His presence filled the whole room.

‘Well, my chuck!’ he said, and kissed her on the cheek.

She gazed at him with a look that might mean anything.  Did she raise her cheek to his greeting, or was it fancy that she had endured, rather than accepted, his kiss?  He was scarcely sure.  And if she had endured instead of accepting the kiss, was her mood to be attributed to his lateness for tea, or to the fact that she was aware of the episode of the geese?  He could not divine.

‘Pikelets!  Good!’ he exclaimed, taking the cover off the dish.

This strong, successful, and dominant man adored his wife, and went in fear of her.  She was his first love, but his second spouse.  They had been married ten years.  In those ten years they had quarrelled only five times, and she had changed the very colour of his life.  Till his second marriage he had boasted that he belonged to the people and retained the habits of the people.  Clara, though she also belonged to the people, very soon altered all that.  Clara had a passion for the genteel.  Like many warm-hearted, honest, clever, and otherwise sensible persons, Clara was a snob, but a charming little snob.  She ordered him to forget that he belonged to the people.  She refused to listen when he talked in the dialect.  She made him dress with opulence, and even with tidiness; she made him buy a fashionable house and fill it with fine furniture; she made him buy a brougham in which her gentility could pay calls and do shopping (she shopped in Oldcastle, where a decrepit aristocracy of tradesmen sneered at Hanbridge’s lack of style); she had her ‘day’; she taught the servants to enter the reception-rooms without knocking; she took tea in bed in the morning, and tea in the afternoon in the drawing-room.  She would have instituted dinner at seven, but she was a wise woman, and realized that too much tyranny often means revolution and the crumbling of-thrones; therefore the ancient plebeian custom of high tea at six was allowed to persist and continue.

She it was who had compelled Josiah (or bewitched, beguiled, coaxed and wheedled him), after a public refusal, to accept the unusual post of Deputy-Mayor.  In two years’ time he might count on being Mayor.  Why, then, should Clara have been so anxious for this secondary dignity?  Because, in that year of royal festival, Bursley, in common with many other boroughs, had had a fancy to choose a Mayor out of the House of Lords.  The Earl of Chell, a magnate of the county, had consented to wear the mayoral chain and dispense the mayoral hospitalities on condition that he was provided with a deputy for daily use.