His little blinking eyes had a red border.  The skin of his pale small face was wrinkled in millions of minute creases.  His arms and legs were marvellously thin and sharply angular.  The corners of his heliotrope lips were turned down, as usual, in a mysterious comment on the world; and his smile, as he fronted Constance with his excessive height, crowned the mystery.

Constance stared, at a loss.  It surely could not after all be true, the substance of the rumours that had floated like vapours in the Square for eight years and more!

“What ...?” she began.

“Me, and her!” He jerked his head in the direction of Miss Insull.

The dog had leisurely strolled forward to inspect the edges of the fiance’s trousers.  Miss Insull summoned the animal with a noise of fingers, and then bent down and caressed it.  A strange gesture proving the validity of Charles Critchlow’s discovery that in Maria Insull a human being was buried!

Miss Insull was, as near as any one could guess, forty years of age.  For twenty-five years she had served in the shop, passing about twelve hours a day in the shop; attending regularly at least three religious services at the Wesleyan Chapel or School on Sundays, and sleeping with her mother, whom she kept.  She had never earned more than thirty shillings a week, and yet her situation was considered to be exceptionally good.  In the eternal fusty dusk of the shop she had gradually lost such sexual characteristics and charms as she had once possessed.  She was as thin and flat as Charles Critchlow himself.  It was as though her bosom had suffered from a prolonged drought at a susceptible period of development, and had never recovered.  The one proof that blood ran in her veins was the pimply quality of her ruined complexion, and the pimples of that brickish expanse proved that the blood was thin and bad.  Her hands and feet were large and ungainly; the skin of the fingers was roughened by coarse contacts to the texture of emery-paper.  On six days a week she wore black; on the seventh a kind of discreet half-mourning.  She was honest, capable, and industrious; and beyond the confines of her occupation she had no curiosity, no intelligence, no ideas.  Superstitions and prejudices, deep and violent, served her for ideas; but she could incomparably sell silks and bonnets, braces and oilcloth; in widths, lengths, and prices she never erred; she never annoyed a customer, nor foolishly promised what could not be performed, nor was late nor negligent, nor disrespectful.  No one knew anything about her, because there was nothing to know.  Subtract the shop-assistant from her, and naught remained.  Benighted and spiritually dead, she existed by habit.