“I am a wicked girl!” she said quite frankly, on the road to the rendezvous.  “It is a dream that I am going to meet him.  It cannot be true.  There is time to go back.  If I go back I am safe.  I have simply called at Miss Chetwynd’s and she wasn’t in, and no one can say a word.  But if I go on—­if I’m seen!  What a fool I am to go on!”

And she went on, impelled by, amongst other things, an immense, naive curiosity, and the vanity which the bare fact of his note had excited.  The Loop railway was being constructed at that period, and hundreds of navvies were at work on it between Bursley and Turnhill.  When she came to the new bridge over the cutting, he was there, as he had written that he would be.

They were very nervous, they greeted each other stiffly and as though they had met then for the first time that day.  Nothing was said about his note, nor about her response to it.  Her presence was treated by both of them as a basic fact of the situation which it would be well not to disturb by comment.  Sophia could not hide her shame, but her shame only aggravated the stinging charm of her beauty.  She was wearing a hard Amazonian hat, with a lifted veil, the final word of fashion that spring in the Five Towns; her face, beaten by the fresh breeze, shone rosily; her eyes glittered under the dark hat, and the violent colours of her Victorian frock—­ green and crimson—­could not spoil those cheeks.  If she looked earthwards, frowning, she was the more adorable so.  He had come down the clayey incline from the unfinished red bridge to welcome her, and when the salutations were over they stood still, he gazing apparently at the horizon and she at the yellow marl round the edges of his boots.  The encounter was as far away from Sophia’s ideal conception as Manchester from Venice.

“So this is the new railway!” said she.

“Yes,” said he.  “This is your new railway.  You can see it better from the bridge.”

“But it’s very sludgy up there,” she objected with a pout.

“Further on it’s quite dry,” he reassured her.

From the bridge they had a sudden view of a raw gash in the earth; and hundreds of men were crawling about in it, busy with minute operations, like flies in a great wound.  There was a continuous rattle of picks, resembling a muffled shower of hail, and in the distance a tiny locomotive was leading a procession of tiny waggons.

“And those are the navvies!” she murmured.

The unspeakable doings of the navvies in the Five Towns had reached even her:  how they drank and swore all day on Sundays, how their huts and houses were dens of the most appalling infamy, how they were the curse of a God-fearing and respectable district!  She and Gerald Scales glanced down at these dangerous beasts of prey in their yellow corduroys and their open shirts revealing hairy chests.  No doubt they both thought how inconvenient it was that railways could not be brought into existence without the aid of such revolting and swinish animals.  They glanced down from the height of their nice decorum and felt the powerful attraction of similar superior manners.  The manners of the navvies were such that Sophia could not even regard them, nor Gerald Scales permit her to regard them, without blushing.