Then Maria Critchlow had gone a step further.  She had summoned the eldest assistant to her corner and had informed her, with all the solemnity of a confession made to assuage a conscience which has been tortured too long, that she had on many occasions been guilty of sexual irregularity with her late employer, Samuel Povey.  There was no truth whatever in this accusation (which everybody, however, took care not to mention to Constance); it merely indicated, perhaps, the secret aspirations of Maria Insull, the virgin.  The assistant was properly scandalized, more by the crudity of Mrs. Critchlow’s language than by the alleged sin buried in the past.  Goodness knows what the assistant would have done!  But two hours later Maria Critchlow tried to commit suicide by stabbing herself with a pair of scissors.  There was blood in the shop.

With as little delay as possible she had been driven away to the asylum.  Charles Critchlow, enveloped safely in the armour of his senile egotism, had shown no emotion, and very little activity.  The shop was closed.  And as a general draper’s it never opened again.  That was the end of Baines’s.  Two assistants found themselves without a livelihood.  The small tumble with the great.

Constance’s emotion was more than pardonable; it was justified.  She could not eat and Lily could not persuade her to eat.  In an unhappy moment Dick Povey mentioned—­he never could remember how, afterwards—­the word Federation!  And then Constance, from a passive figure of grief became a menace.  She overwhelmed Dick Povey with her anathema of Federation, for Dick was a citizen of Hanbridge, where this detestable movement for Federation had had its birth.  All the misfortunes of St. Luke’s Square were due to that great, busy, grasping, unscrupulous neighbour.  Had not Hanbridge done enough, without wanting to merge all the Five Towns into one town, of which of course itself would be the centre?  For Constance, Hanbridge was a borough of unprincipled adventurers, bent on ruining the ancient ‘Mother of the Five Towns’ for its own glory and aggrandizement.  Let Constance hear no more of Federation!  Her poor sister Sophia had been dead against Federation, and she had been quite right!  All really respectable people were against it!  The attempted suicide of Mrs. Critchlow sealed the fate of Federation and damned it for ever, in Constance’s mind.  Her hatred of the idea of it was intensified into violent animosity; insomuch that in the result she died a martyr to the cause of Bursley’s municipal independence.

III

It was on a muddy day in October that the first great battle for and against Federation was fought in Bursley.  Constance was suffering severely from sciatica.  She was also suffering from disgust with the modern world.