yet in those days she had thought herself so sedate and mature!  She sighed, half with lancinating regret, and half in gentle disdain of that mercurial creature aged less than thirty.  At fifty-one she regarded herself as old.  And she was old.  And Amy had the tricks and manners of an old spinster.  Thus the excitement in the house was an ‘old’ excitement, and, like Constance’s desire to look smart, it had its ridiculous side, which was also its tragic side, the side that would have made a boor guffaw, and a hysterical fool cry, and a wise man meditate sadly upon the earth’s fashion of renewing itself.

At half-past one Constance was dressed, with the exception of her gloves.  She looked at the clock a second time to make sure that she might safely glance round the house without fear of missing the train.  She went up into the bedroom on the second-floor, her and Sophia’s old bedroom, which she had prepared with enormous care for Sophia.  The airing of that room had been an enterprise of days, for, save by a minister during the sittings of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference at Bursley, it had never been occupied since the era when Maria Insull used occasionally to sleep in the house.  Cyril clung to his old room on his visits.  Constance had an ample supply of solid and stately furniture, and the chamber destined for Sophia was lightened in every corner by the reflections of polished mahogany.  It was also fairly impregnated with the odour of furniture paste—­an odour of which no housewife need be ashamed.  Further, it had been re-papered in a delicate blue, with one of the new ‘art’ patterns.  It was a ‘Baines’ room.  And Constance did not care where Sophia came from, nor what Sophia had been accustomed to, nor into what limited company Sophia had been transformed—­that room was adequate!  It could not have been improved upon.  You had only to look at the crocheted mats—­even those on the washstand under the white-and-gold ewer and other utensils.  It was folly to expose such mats to the splashings of a washstand, but it was sublime folly.  Sophia might remove them if she cared.  Constance was house-proud; house-pride had slumbered within her; now it blazed forth.

A fire brightened the drawing-room, which was a truly magnificent apartment, a museum of valuables collected by the Baines and the Maddack families since the year 1840, tempered by the latest novelties in antimacassars and cloths.  In all Bursley there could have been few drawing-rooms to compare with Constance’s.  Constance knew it.  She was not afraid of her drawing-room being seen by anybody.

She passed for an instant into her own bedroom, where Amy was patiently picking balls of paper from the bed.

“Now you quite understand about tea?” Constance asked.

“Oh yes, ’m,” said Amy, as if to say:  “How much oftener are you going to ask me that question?” “Are you off now, ’m?”

“Yes,” said Constance.  “Come and fasten the front-door after me.”