As she took off her hat and jacket in the hard sinister room, she looked like a violet roughly transplanted and bidden to blossom in the mire.  She knew that amid that environment she could be nothing but incapable, dull, stupid, futile, and plain.  She knew that she had no brains to comprehend and no energy to prevail.  Every detail repelled her—­the absence of fire-irons in the hearth, the business almanacs on the discoloured walls, the great flat table-desk, the dusty samples of tea-pots in the window, the vast green safe in the corner, the glimpses of industrial squalor in the yard, the sound of uncouth voices from the clerks’ office, the muffled beat of machinery under the floor, and the strange uninhabited useless appearance of a small room seen through a half-open door near the safe.  She would have given a year of life, in that first moment, to be helping her mother in some despised monotonous household task at Hillport.

She felt that she was being outrageously deprived of a natural right, hitherto enjoyed without let, to have the golden fruits of labour brought to her in discreet silence as to their origin.

Stanway struck a bell with determination, and the manager appeared, a tall, thin, sandy-haired man of middle age, who wore a grey tailed-coat and a white apron.

‘Ha!  Mayer!  That you?’

‘Yes, sir....  Good afternoon, miss.’

‘Good afternoon,’ Ethel simpered foolishly, and she had it in her to have slain both men because she felt such a silly schoolgirl.

‘I wanted Ryley.  Where is he?’

’He’s somewhere on the bank,[3] sir—­speaking to the mouldmaker, I think.’

  [3] Bank = earthenware manufactory.  But here the word is used in a
      limited sense, meaning the industrial, as distinguished from the
      bureaucratic, part of the manufactory.

’Well, just bring me in that letter from Paris that came on Saturday, will you?’ Stanway requested.

‘I’ve several things to speak to you about,’ said Mr. Mayer, when he had brought the letter.

‘Directly,’ Stanway answered, waving him away, and then turning to Ethel:  ‘Now, young lady, I want this letter translating.’  He placed it before her on the table, together with some blank paper.

‘Yes, father,’ she said humbly.

Three hours a week for seven years she had sat in front of French manuals at the school at Oldcastle; but she knew that, even if the destiny of nations turned on it, she could not translate that letter of ten lines.  Nevertheless she was bound to make a pretence of doing so.

‘I don’t think I can without a dictionary,’ she plaintively murmured, after a few minutes.

‘Oh!  Here’s a French dictionary,’ he replied, producing one from a drawer, much to her chagrin; she had hoped that he would not have a dictionary.

Then Stanway began to look through a pile of correspondence, and to scribble in a large saffron-coloured diary.  He went out to Mr. Mayer; Mr. Mayer came in to him; they called to each other from room to room.  The machinery stopped beneath and started again.  A horse fell down in the yard, and Stanway, watching from the window, exclaimed:  ’Tsh!  That carter!’