She dashed from the room, banging the door with a shock that made the house rattle.  And she had shouted so loud that she might have been heard in the shop, and even in the kitchen.  It was a startling experience for Mrs. Baines.  Mrs. Baines, why did you saddle yourself with a witness?  Why did you so positively say that you intended to have an answer?

“Really,” she stammered, pulling her dignity about her shoulders like a garment that the wind has snatched off.  “I never dreamed that poor girl had such a dreadful temper!  What a pity it is, for her own sake!” It was the best she could do.

Constance, who could not bear to witness her mother’s humiliation, vanished very quietly from the room.  She got halfway upstairs to the second floor, and then, hearing the loud, rapid, painful, regular intake of sobbing breaths, she hesitated and crept down again.

This was Mrs. Baines’s first costly experience of the child thankless for having been brought into the world.  It robbed her of her profound, absolute belief in herself.  She had thought she knew everything in her house and could do everything there.  And lo! she had suddenly stumbled against an unsuspected personality at large in her house, a sort of hard marble affair that informed her by means of bumps that if she did not want to be hurt she must keep out of the way.

V

On the Sunday afternoon Mrs. Baines was trying to repose a little in the drawing-room, where she had caused a fire to be lighted.  Constance was in the adjacent bedroom with her father.  Sophia lay between blankets in the room overhead with a feverish cold.  This cold and her new dress were Mrs. Baines’s sole consolation at the moment.  She had prophesied a cold for Sophia, refuser of castor-oil, and it had come.  Sophia had received, for standing in her nightdress at a draughty window of a May morning, what Mrs. Baines called ‘nature’s slap in the face.’  As for the dress, she had worshipped God in it, and prayed for Sophia in it, before dinner; and its four double rows of gimp on the skirt had been accounted a great success.  With her lace-bordered mantle and her low, stringed bonnet she had assuredly given a unique lustre to the congregation at chapel.  She was stout; but the fashions, prescribing vague outlines, broad downward slopes, and vast amplitudes, were favourable to her shape.  It must not be supposed that stout women of a certain age never seek to seduce the eye and trouble the meditations of man by other than moral charms.  Mrs. Baines knew that she was comely, natty, imposing, and elegant; and the knowledge gave her real pleasure.  She would look over her shoulder in the glass as anxious as a girl:  make no mistake.