There was much buzzing and tittering and laughing aloud.  All belonged to the class of needlewomen who preserve appearances; many of them were becomingly dressed, and none betrayed extreme poverty.  Probably a fourth came from homes in which they were not the only wage-earners, and would not starve if work slackened now and then, having fathers or brothers to help them.  Whether they liked coming to work or not, all showed much cheerfulness at the commencement of the day.  They greeted each other pleasantly, sometimes affectionately, and not one who lacked a story of personal incident to be quickly related to a friend whilst the work was being given out.  So much seemed to happen in the hours of freedom.

Lydia was much quieter than usual.  It was not her wont to gossip of her own affairs, or to pry into the secrets of her acquaintances; but with the little group of those with whom she was intimate she had generally some piece of merriment to share, always marked by kindness of feeling.  She was a favourite with the most sensible girls of her own age.  Thyrza had never been exactly a favourite, though some older than herself always used to pet her, generally causing her annoyance.

About a quarter of an hour had passed, and work was getting into trim, when a girl, a late arrival, in coming to her place, handed Lydia a letter.

‘Someone downstairs asked me to give it you,’ she whispered.  ’You needn’t blush, you know.’

Lydia was too surprised to manifest any such self-consciousness.  She murmured thanks, and looked at the address.  It was a man’s writing, but she had no idea whose.  She opened the envelope and found Ackroyd’s short note.

What did this mean?  It at once flashed across Lydia’s mind that there might be some connection between this and Thyrza’s strange disorder.  Old habit still brought Ackroyd and Thyrza together in her thoughts.  Yet how was it possible?  Ackroyd was engaged to Totty Nancarrow, and Thyrza had never shown the least interest when she mentioned him of late.  Was he going to make trouble, now at the last moment, when everything seemed to have taken the final form?

Since Thyrza’s engagement to Gilbert, there was no longer need of subtle self-deceptions, but, though she might now freely think of him, Lydia soon found that Ackroyd was not the same in her eyes.  The first rumours of his abandonment to vulgar dissipation she utterly refused to credit, but before long she had to believe them in spite of herself.  She saw him one night coming out of a public-house, singing a drunken song.  It was a terrible blow to her; she had to question herself much, and to make great efforts to understand a man’s nature.  She had thought him incapable of such things.  The vague stories of earlier wildness she had held no account of.  When a woman says ‘Oh, that is past,’ she means ’It does not exist, and never did exist.’