They pressed their noses against the window of the show-room, and gazed down into the Square as perpendicularly as the projecting front of the shop would allow.  The show-room was over the millinery and silken half of the shop.  Over the woollen and shirting half were the drawing-room and the chief bedroom.  When in quest of articles of coquetry, you mounted from the shop by a curving stair, and your head gradually rose level with a large apartment having a mahogany counter in front of the window and along one side, yellow linoleum on the floor, many cardboard boxes, a magnificent hinged cheval glass, and two chairs.  The window-sill being lower than the counter, there was a gulf between the panes and the back of the counter, into which important articles such as scissors, pencils, chalk, and artificial flowers were continually disappearing:  another proof of the architect’s incompetence.

The girls could only press their noses against the window by kneeling on the counter, and this they were doing.  Constance’s nose was snub, but agreeably so.  Sophia had a fine Roman nose; she was a beautiful creature, beautiful and handsome at the same time.  They were both of them rather like racehorses, quivering with delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; exquisite, enchanting proof of the circulation of the blood; innocent, artful, roguish, prim, gushing, ignorant, and miraculously wise.  Their ages were sixteen and fifteen; it is an epoch when, if one is frank, one must admit that one has nothing to learn:  one has learnt simply everything in the previous six months.

“There she goes!” exclaimed Sophia.

Up the Square, from the corner of King Street, passed a woman in a new bonnet with pink strings, and a new blue dress that sloped at the shoulders and grew to a vast circumference at the hem.  Through the silent sunlit solitude of the Square (for it was Thursday afternoon, and all the shops shut except the confectioner’s and one chemist’s) this bonnet and this dress floated northwards in search of romance, under the relentless eyes of Constance and Sophia.  Within them, somewhere, was the soul of Maggie, domestic servant at Baines’s.  Maggie had been at the shop since before the creation of Constance and Sophia.  She lived seventeen hours of each day in an underground kitchen and larder, and the other seven in an attic, never going out except to chapel on Sunday evenings, and once a month on Thursday afternoons.  “Followers” were most strictly forbidden to her; but on rare occasions an aunt from Longshaw was permitted as a tremendous favour to see her in the subterranean den.  Everybody, including herself, considered that she had a good “place,” and was well treated.  It was undeniable, for instance, that she was allowed to fall in love exactly as she chose, provided she did not “carry on” in the kitchen or the yard.  And as a fact, Maggie had fallen in love.  In seventeen years she had been engaged eleven times.  No one could conceive