ugliness; the inglorious travail of two hundred thousand people, above ground and below it, filled the day and the night.  But here, as it were suddenly, out of that earthy and laborious bed, rose the blossom of luxury, grace, and leisure, the final elegance of the industrial district of the Five Towns.  The contrast between Leonora and the rough creatures in the archway, between the flower and the phosphates which nourished it, was sharp and decisive:  and Leonora, in the September sunshine, was well aware of the contrast.  She felt that the loud-voiced girls were at one extremity of the scale and she at the other; and this arrangement seemed natural, necessary, inevitable.

She was a beautiful woman.  She had a slim perfect figure; quite simply she carried her head so high and her shoulders so square that her back seemed to be hollowed out, and no tightness on the part of a bodice could hide this charming concavity.  Her face was handsome with its large regular features; one noticed the abundant black hair under the hat, the thick eyebrows, the brown and opaque skin, the teeth impeccably white, and the firm, unyielding mouth and chin.  Underneath the chin, half muffling it, came a white muslin bow, soft, frail, feminate, an enchanting disclaimer of that facial sternness and the masculinity of that tailor-made dress, a signal at once provocative and wistful of the woman.  She had brains; they appeared in her keen dark eyes.  Her judgment was experienced and mature.  She knew her world and its men and women.  She was not too soon shocked, not too severe in her verdicts, not the victim of too many illusions.  And yet, though everything about her witnessed to a serene temperament and the continual appeasing of mild desires, she dreamed sadly, like the girls in the archway, of an existence more distinguished than her own; an existence brilliant and tender, where dalliance and high endeavour, virtue and the flavour of sin, eternal appetite and eternal satisfaction, were incredibly united.  Even now, on her fortieth birthday, she still believed in the possibility of a conscious state of positive and continued happiness, and regretted that she should have missed it.

The imminence and the arrival of this dire birthday, this day of wrath on which the proudest woman will kneel to implacable destiny and beg a reprieve, had induced the reveries natural to it—­the self-searching, the exchange of old fallacies for new, the dismayed glance forward, the lingering look behind.  Absorbed though she was in the control of the sensitive steed, the field of her mind’s eye seemed to be entirely filled by an image of the woman of forty as imagined by herself at the age of twenty.  And she was that woman now!  But she did not feel like forty; at thirty she had not felt thirty; she could only accept the almanac and the rules of arithmetic.  The interminable years of her marriage rolled back, and she was eighteen again, ingenuous and trustful, convinced