“After all,” she argued with her soul angrily, petulantly, “could you expect the boy to do anything else?  He is a serious student, he has had a brilliant success, and is he to be tied to your apron-strings?  The idea is preposterous.  It isn’t as if he was an idler, or a bad son.  No mother could have a better son.  A nice thing, that he should stay all his life in Bursley simply because you don’t like being left alone!”

Unfortunately one might as well argue with a mule as with one’s soul.  Her soul only kept on saying monotonously:  “I’m a lonely old woman now.  I’ve nothing to live for any more, and I’m no use to anybody.  Once I was young and proud.  And this is what my life has come to!  This is the end!”

When she reached home, Amy had not touched the breakfast things; the carpet was still wrinkled, and the mat still out of place.  And, through the desolating atmosphere of reaction after a terrific crisis, she marched directly upstairs, entered his plundered room, and beheld the disorder of the bed in which he had slept.

BOOK III

SOPHIA

CHAPTER I

THE ELOPEMENT

I

Her soberly rich dress had a countrified air, as she waited, ready for the streets, in the bedroom of the London hotel on the afternoon of the first of July, 1866; but there was nothing of the provincial in that beautiful face, nor in that bearing at once shy and haughty; and her eager heart soared beyond geographical boundaries.

It was the Hatfield Hotel, in Salisbury Street, between the Strand and the river.  Both street and hotel are now gone, lost in the vast foundations of the Savoy and the Cecil; but the type of the Hatfield lingers with ever-increasing shabbiness in Jermyn Street.  In 1866, with its dark passages and crooked stairs, its candles, its carpets and stuffs which had outlived their patterns, its narrow dining-room where a thousand busy flies ate together at one long table, its acrid stagnant atmosphere, and its disturbing sensation of dirt everywhere concealing itself, it stood forth in rectitude as a good average modern hotel.  The patched and senile drabness of the bedroom made an environment that emphasized Sophia’s flashing youth.  She alone in it was unsullied.

There was a knock at the door, apparently gay and jaunty.  But she thought, truly:  “He’s nearly as nervous as I am!” And in her sick nervousness she coughed, and then tried to take full possession of herself.  The moment had at last come which would divide her life as a battle divides the history of a nation.  Her mind in an instant swept backwards through an incredible three months.