Happily the inhabitants of the Five Towns in that era were passably pleased with themselves, and they never even suspected that they were not quite modern and quite awake.  They thought that the intellectual, the industrial, and the social movements had gone about as far as these movements could go, and they were amazed at their own progress.  Instead of being humble and ashamed, they actually showed pride in their pitiful achievements.  They ought to have looked forward meekly to the prodigious feats of posterity; but, having too little faith and too much conceit, they were content to look behind and make comparisons with the past.  They did not foresee the miraculous generation which is us.  A poor, blind, complacent people!  The ludicrous horse-car was typical of them.  The driver rang a huge bell, five minutes before starting, that could he heard from the Wesleyan Chapel to the Cock Yard, and then after deliberations and hesitations the vehicle rolled off on its rails into unknown dangers while passengers shouted good-bye.  At Bleakridge it had to stop for the turnpike, and it was assisted up the mountains of Leveson Place and Sutherland Street (towards Hanbridge) by a third horse, on whose back was perched a tiny, whip-cracking boy; that boy lived like a shuttle on the road between Leveson Place and Sutherland Street, and even in wet weather he was the envy of all other boys.  After half an hour’s perilous transit the car drew up solemnly in a narrow street by the Signal office in Hanbridge, and the ruddy driver, having revolved many times the polished iron handle of his sole brake, turned his attention to his passengers in calm triumph, dismissing them with a sort of unsung doxology.

And this was regarded as the last word of traction!  A whip-cracking boy on a tip horse!  Oh, blind, blind!  You could not foresee the hundred and twenty electric cars that now rush madly bumping and thundering at twenty miles an hour through all the main streets of the district!

So that naturally Sophia, infected with the pride of her period, had no misgivings whatever concerning the final elegance of the princesses.  She studied them as the fifteen apostles of the ne plus ultra; then, having taken some flowers and plumes out of a box, amid warnings from Constance, she retreated behind the glass, and presently emerged as a great lady in the style of the princesses.  Her mother’s tremendous new gown ballooned about her in all its fantastic richness and expensiveness.  And with the gown she had put on her mother’s importance—­that mien of assured authority, of capacity tested in many a crisis, which characterized Mrs. Baines, and which Mrs. Baines seemed to impart to her dresses even before she had regularly worn them.  For it was a fact that Mrs. Baines’s empty garments inspired respect, as though some essence had escaped from her and remained in them.

“Sophia!”

Constance stayed her needle, and, without lifting her head, gazed, with eyes raised from the wool-work, motionless at the posturing figure of her sister.  It was sacrilege that she was witnessing, a prodigious irreverence.  She was conscious of an expectation that punishment would instantly fall on this daring, impious child.  But she, who never felt these mad, amazing impulses, could nevertheless only smile fearfully.