She required diplomacy from others, but did not render it again.  Her attitude, indeed, was one of half-hidden disdain, now gentle, now coldly bitter.  She would not wear an apron, in an age when aprons were almost essential to decency.  No!  She would not wear an apron, and there was an end of it.  She was not so tidy as Constance, and if Constance’s hands had taken on the coarse texture which comes from commerce with needles, pins, artificial flowers, and stuffs, Sophia’s fine hands were seldom innocent of ink.  But Sophia was splendidly beautiful.  And even her mother and Constance had an instinctive idea that that face was, at any rate, a partial excuse for her asperity.

“Well,” said Constance, “if you won’t, I do believe I shall ask mother if she will.”

Sophia, bending over her books, made no answer.  But the top of her head said:  “This has no interest for me whatever.”

Constance left the room, and in a moment returned with her mother.

“Sophia,” said her mother, with gay excitement, “you might go and sit with your father for a bit while Constance and I just run up to the playground to see the elephant.  You can work just as well in there as here.  Your father’s asleep.”

“Oh, very, well!” Sophia agreed haughtily.  “Whatever is all this fuss about an elephant?  Anyhow, it’ll be quieter in your room.  The noise here is splitting.”  She gave a supercilious glance into the Square as she languidly rose.

It was the morning of the third day of Bursley Wakes; not the modern finicking and respectable, but an orgiastic carnival, gross in all its manifestations of joy.  The whole centre of the town was given over to the furious pleasures of the people.  Most of the Square was occupied by Wombwell’s Menagerie, in a vast oblong tent, whose raging beasts roared and growled day and night.  And spreading away from this supreme attraction, right up through the market-place past the Town Hall to Duck Bank, Duck Square and the waste land called the ‘playground’ were hundreds of booths with banners displaying all the delights of the horrible.  You could see the atrocities of the French Revolution, and of the Fiji Islands, and the ravages of unspeakable diseases, and the living flesh of a nearly nude human female guaranteed to turn the scale at twenty-two stone, and the skeletons of the mysterious phantoscope, and the bloody contests of champions naked to the waist (with the chance of picking up a red tooth as a relic).  You could try your strength by hitting an image of a fellow-creature in the stomach, and test your aim by knocking off the heads of other images with a wooden ball.  You could also shoot with rifles at various targets.  All the streets were lined with stalls loaded with food in heaps, chiefly dried fish, the entrails of animals, and gingerbread.  All the public-houses were crammed, and frenzied jolly drunkards, men and women, lunged along the pavements everywhere, their shouts vying with the trumpets, horns, and drums of the booths, and the shrieking, rattling toys that the children carried.