The renewed sight of him seemed to have wakened her out of a sleep.  Assuredly she was not the same Sophia.  As she sat in her sister’s chair in the corner, entrenched behind the perpendicular boxes, playing nervously with the scissors, her beautiful face was transfigured into the ravishingly angelic.  It would have been impossible for Mr. Gerald Scales, or anybody else, to credit, as he gazed at those lovely, sensitive, vivacious, responsive features, that Sophia was not a character of heavenly sweetness and perfection.  She did not know what she was doing; she was nothing but the exquisite expression of a deep instinct to attract and charm.  Her soul itself emanated from her in an atmosphere of allurement and acquiescence.  Could those laughing lips hang in a heavy pout?  Could that delicate and mild voice be harsh?  Could those burning eyes be coldly inimical?  Never!  The idea was inconceivable!  And Mr. Gerald Scales, with his head over the top of the boxes, yielded to the spell.  Remarkable that Mr. Gerald Scales, with all his experience, should have had to come to Bursley to find the pearl, the paragon, the ideal!  But so it was.  They met in an equal abandonment; the only difference between them was that Mr. Scales, by force of habit, kept his head.

“I see it’s your wakes here,” said he.

He was polite to the wakes; but now, with the least inflection in the world, he put the wakes at its proper level in the scheme of things as a local unimportance!  She adored him for this; she was athirst for sympathy in the task of scorning everything local.

“I expect you didn’t know,” she said, implying that there was every reason why a man of his mundane interests should not know.

“I should have remembered if I had thought,” said he.  “But I didn’t think.  What’s this about an elephant?”

“Oh!” she exclaimed.  “Have you heard of that?”

“My porter was full of it.”

“Well,” she said, “of course it’s a very big thing in Bursley.”

As she smiled in gentle pity of poor Bursley, he naturally did the same.  And he thought how much more advanced and broad the younger generation was than the old!  He would never have dared to express his real feelings about Bursley to Mrs. Baines, or even to Mr. Povey (who was, however, of no generation); yet here was a young woman actually sharing them.

She told him all the history of the elephant.

“Must have been very exciting,” he commented, despite himself.

“Do you know,” she replied, “it was.”

After all, Bursley was climbing in their opinion.

“And mother and my sister and Mr. Povey have all gone to see it.  That’s why they’re not here.”

That the elephant should have caused both Mr. Povey and Mrs. Baines to forget that the representative of Birkinshaws was due to call was indeed a final victory for the elephant.

“But not you!” he exclaimed.