_ The uneasiness of Mrs. Baines flowed and ebbed, during the next
three months, influenced by Sophia's moods. There were days when
Sophia was the old Sophia--the forbidding, difficult, waspish, and
even hedgehog Sophia. But there were other days on which Sophia
seemed to be drawing joy and gaiety and goodwill from some secret
source, from some fount whose nature and origin none could divine.
It was on these days that the uneasiness of Mrs. Baines waxed. She
had the wildest suspicions; she was almost capable of accusing
Sophia of carrying on a clandestine correspondence; she saw Sophia
and Gerald Scales deeply and wickedly in love; she saw them with
their arms round each other's necks. ... And then she called
herself a middle-aged fool, to base such a structure of suspicion
on a brief encounter in the street and on an idea, a fancy, a
curious and irrational notion! Sophia had a certain streak of pure
nobility in that exceedingly heterogeneous thing, her character.
Moreover, Mrs. Baines watched the posts, and she also watched
Sophia--she was not the woman to trust to a streak of pure
nobility--and she came to be sure that Sophia's sinfulness, if
any, was not such as could be weighed in a balance, or collected
together by stealth and then suddenly placed before the girl on a
charger.
Still, she would have given much to see inside Sophia's lovely
head. Ah! Could she have done so, what sleep-destroying wonders
she would have witnessed! By what bright lamps burning in what
mysterious grottoes and caverns of the brain would her mature eyes
have been dazzled! Sophia was living for months on the exhaustless
ardent vitality absorbed during a magical two minutes in Wedgwood
Street. She was living chiefly on the flaming fire struck in her
soul by the shock of seeing Gerald Scales in the porch of the
Wedgwood Institution as she came out of the Free Library with
Experience Of Life tucked into her large astrakhan muff. He had
stayed to meet her, then: she knew it! "After all," her heart
said, "I must be very beautiful, for I have attracted the pearl of
men!" And she remembered her face in the glass. The value and the
power of beauty were tremendously proved to her. He, the great man
of the world, the handsome and elegant man with a thousand strange
friends and a thousand interests far remote from her, had remained
in Bursley on the mere chance of meeting her! She was proud, but
her pride was drowned in bliss. "I was just looking at this
inscription about Mr. Gladstone." "So you decided to come out as
usual!" "And may I ask what book you have chosen?" These were the
phrases she heard, and to which she responded with similar
phrases. And meanwhile a miracle of ecstasy had opened--opened
like a flower. She was walking along Wedgwood Street by his side,
slowly, on the scraped pavements, where marble bulbs of snow had
defied the spade and remained. She and he were exactly of the same
height, and she kept looking into his face and he into hers. This
was all the miracle. Except that she was not walking on the
pavement--she was walking on the intangible sward of paradise!
Except that the houses had receded and faded, and the passers-by
were subtilized into unnoticeable ghosts! Except that her mother
and Constance had become phantasmal beings existing at an immense
distance!
What had happened? Nothing! The most commonplace occurrence! The
eternal cause had picked up a commercial traveller (it might have
been a clerk or curate, but it in fact was a commercial
traveller), and endowed him with all the glorious, unique,
incredible attributes of a god, and planted him down before Sophia
in order to produce the eternal effect. A miracle performed
specially for Sophia's benefit! No one else in Wedgwood Street saw
the god walking along by her side. No one else saw anything but a
simple commercial traveller. Yes, the most commonplace occurrence!
Of course at the corner of the street he had to go. "Till next
time!" he murmured. And fire came out of his eyes and lighted in
Sophia's lovely head those lamps which Mrs. Baines was mercifully
spared from seeing. And he had shaken hands and raised his hat.
Imagine a god raising his hat! And he went off on two legs,
precisely like a dashing little commercial traveller.
And, escorted by the equivocal Angel of Eclipses, she had turned
into King Street, and arranged her face, and courageously met her
mother. Her mother had not at first perceived the unusual; for
mothers, despite their reputation to the contrary, really are the
blindest creatures. Sophia, the naive ninny, had actually supposed
that her walking along a hundred yards of pavement with a god by
her side was not going to excite remark! What a delusion! It is
true, certainly, that no one saw the god by direct vision. But
Sophia's cheeks, Sophia's eyes, the curve of Sophia's neck as her
soul yearned towards the soul of the god--these phenomena were
immeasurably more notable than Sophia guessed. An account of them,
in a modified form to respect Mrs. Baines's notorious dignity, had
healed the mother of her blindness and led to that characteristic
protest from her, "I shall be glad if you will not walk about the
streets with young men," etc.
When the period came for the reappearance of Mr. Scales, Mrs.
Baines outlined a plan, and when the circular announcing the exact
time of his arrival was dropped into the letter-box, she
formulated the plan in detail. In the first place, she was
determined to be indisposed and invisible herself, so that Mr.
Scales might be foiled in any possible design to renew social
relations in the parlour. In the second place, she flattered
Constance with a single hint--oh, the vaguest and briefest!--and
Constance understood that she was not to quit the shop on the
appointed morning. In the third place, she invented a way of
explaining to Mr. Povey that the approaching advent of Gerald
Scales must not be mentioned. And in the fourth place, she
deliberately made appointments for Sophia with two millinery
customers in the showroom, so that Sophia might be imprisoned in
the showroom.
Having thus left nothing to chance, she told herself that she was
a foolish woman full of nonsense. But this did not prevent her
from putting her lips together firmly and resolving that Mr.
Scales should have no finger in the pie of HER family. She had
acquired information concerning Mr. Scales, at secondhand, from
Lawyer Pratt. More than this, she posed the question in a broader
form--why should a young girl be permitted any interest in any
young man whatsoever? The everlasting purpose had made use of Mrs.
Baines and cast her off, and,, like most persons in a similar
situation, she was, unconsciously and quite honestly, at odds with
the everlasting purpose. _