CHAPTER III

TOWARDS HOTEL LIFE

I

Sophia wore list slippers in the morning.  It was a habit which she had formed in the Rue Lord Byron—­by accident rather than with an intention to utilize list slippers for the effective supervision of servants.  These list slippers were the immediate cause of important happenings in St. Luke’s Square.  Sophia had been with Constance one calendar month—­it was, of course, astonishing how quickly the time had passed!—­and she had become familiar with the house.  Restraint had gradually ceased to mark the relations of the sisters.  Constance, in particular, hid nothing from Sophia, who was made aware of the minor and major defects of Amy and all the other creakings of the household machine.  Meals were eaten off the ordinary tablecloths, and on the days for ‘turning out’ the parlour, Constance assumed, with a little laugh, that Sophia would excuse Amy’s apron, which she had not had time to change.  In brief, Sophia was no longer a stranger, and nobody felt bound to pretend that things were not exactly what they were.  In spite of the foulness and the provinciality of Bursley, Sophia enjoyed the intimacy with Constance.  As for Constance, she was enchanted.  The inflections of their voices, when they were talking to each other very privately, were often tender, and these sudden surprising tendernesses secretly thrilled both of them.

On the fourth Sunday morning Sophia put on her dressing-gown and those list slippers very early, and paid a visit to Constance’s bedroom.  She was somewhat concerned about Constance, and her concern was pleasurable to her.  She made the most of it.  Amy, with her lifelong carelessness about doors, had criminally failed to latch the street-door of the parlour on the previous morning, and Constance had only perceived the omission by the phenomenon of frigidity in her legs at breakfast.  She always sat with her back to the door, in her mother’s fluted rocking-chair; and Sophia on the spot, but not in the chair, occupied by John Baines in the forties, and in the seventies and later by Samuel Povey.  Constance had been alarmed by that frigidity.  “I shall have a return of my sciatica!” she had exclaimed, and Sophia was startled by the apprehension in her tone.  Before evening the sciatica had indeed revisited Constance’s sciatic nerve, and Sophia for the first time gained an idea of what a pulsating sciatica can do in the way of torturing its victim.  Constance, in addition to the sciatica, had caught a sneezing cold, and the act of sneezing caused her the most acute pain.  Sophia had soon stopped the sneezing.  Constance was got to bed.  Sophia wished to summon the doctor, but Constance assured her that the doctor would have nothing new to advise.  Constance suffered angelically.  The weak and exquisite sweetness of her smile, as she lay in bed under the stress of twinging pain amid hot-water bottles, was amazing to Sophia.  It made her think upon the reserves of Constance’s character, and upon the variety of the manifestations of the Baines’ blood.