As he drove her from the station up the steep old wagon-road he explained the situation, in more than one sense.  Eileen’s girlish intuition helped his lame sentences over the stiles.  Briefly, she was to polish the quondam mill-hand, whom he had married when he, too, was a factory operative, but who had not been able to rise with him.  He was an alderman and a J.P.  That made things difficult enough.  But how if he became Mayor?  An alderman has no necessary feminine, not even alderwoman, but Mayor makes Mayoress.  And a Mayoress is not safe from the visits of royalty itself.  Of course the Mayoress was not to suspect she was being refined; “made a Lady Mayoress,” as Eileen put it to herself.

She entered with a light heart upon a task she soon found heavy.  For the mistress of Holly Hall had no sense of imperfections.  She was a tall and still good-looking person, and this added to her fatal complacency.  Eileen saw that she imagined God made the woman and money the lady, and that between a female in a Paris bonnet and a female in a head-shawl there was a natural gap as between a crested cockatoo and a hedge-sparrow.  Mrs. Maper indeed suffered badly from swelled self, for it had subconsciously expanded with its surroundings.  The wide rooms of the Hall were her spacious skirts, bedecked with the long glitter of the glass-houses; her head reached the roof and wore the weathercock as a feather in her bonnet.  All those whirring engines in the misty valley below were her demon-slaves, and the chimneys puffed up incense at her.  When she drove out, her life-blood coursed pleasurably through the ramping, glossy horses.

Mrs. Maper, in short, saw herself an empress.  It was simply impossible for her to realise that there were eyes which could still see the head-shawl, not the crown.  Her one touch of dignity was grotesque—­it consisted of extending her arm like a stiff sceptre, in moments of emphasis, and literally pointing her remarks with her forefinger.  Sometimes she pointed to the ceiling, sometimes to the carpet, sometimes to the walls.  This digital punctuation appeared to be not only superfluous but irrelevant, for Heaven might be invoked from the floor.

With this bejewelled lady Eileen passed her days either on the Hump, or in the Black Hole, or in the environs, and but for her sense of humour and her power of leading a second life above or below her first, her tenure of the post would have been short.  The most delicate repetitions of mispronounced words, the subtlest substitution of society phrases for factory idioms, fell blunted against an impenetrable ignorance and self-sufficiency.  Short of dropping the pose of companion and boldly rapping a pupil on the knuckles, there seemed to her no way of modifying her mistress.  “Who can refine what Fortune has gilded?” she asked herself in humorous despair.  The appearance of Mr. Maper at dinner brought little relief.  It was a strange meal in the lordly dining room—­three