Nevertheless the Square was not pleased.  The Square was conscious of shame, of dignity departed.  Constance was divided between pain and scornful wrath.  For her, what the Midland had done was to desecrate a shrine.  She hated those flags, and those flaring, staring posters on the honest old brick walls, and the enormous gilded sign, and the windows all filled with a monotonous repetition of the same article, and the bustling assistants.  As for the phonographs, she regarded them as a grave insult; they had been within twenty feet of her drawing-room window!  Twelve-and-sixpenny overcoats!  It was monstrous, and equally monstrous was the gullibility of the people.  How could an overcoat at twelve and sixpence be ‘good.’  She remembered the overcoats made and sold in the shop in the time of her father and her husband, overcoats of which the inconvenience was that they would not wear out!  The Midland, for Constance, was not a trading concern, but something between a cheap-jack and a circus.  She could scarcely bear to walk down the Square, to such a degree did the ignoble frontage of the Midland offend her eye and outrage her ancestral pride.  She even said that she would give up her house.

But when, on the twenty-ninth of September, she received six months’ notice, signed in Critchlow’s shaky hand, to quit the house—­it was wanted for the Midland’s manager, the Midland having taken the premises on condition that they might eject Constance if they chose—­the blow was an exceedingly severe one.  She had sworn to go—­but to be turned out, to be turned out of the house of her birth and out of her father’s home, that was different!  Her pride, injured as it was, had a great deal to support.  It became necessary for her to recollect that she was a Baines.  She affected magnificently not to care.  But she could not refrain from telling all her acquaintances that she was being turned out of her house, and asking them what they thought of that; and when she met Charles Critchlow in the street she seared him with the heat of her resentment.  The enterprise of finding a new house and moving into it loomed before her gigantic, terrible, the idea of it was alone sufficient to make her ill.

Meanwhile, in the matter of Federation, preparations for the pitched battle had been going forward, especially in the columns of the Signal, where the scribes of each one of the Five Towns had proved that all the other towns were in the clutch of unscrupulous gangs of self-seekers.  After months of argument and recrimination, all the towns except Bursley were either favourable or indifferent to the prospect of becoming a part of the twelfth largest town in the United Kingdom.  But in Bursley the opposition was strong, and the twelfth largest town in the United Kingdom could not spring into existence without the consent of Bursley.  The United Kingdom itself was languidly interested in the possibility of suddenly being endowed with a new town of a quarter of a million inhabitants.