alling as occurred went on during his absence in the
afternoon.

One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of
the industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous
insulations. There were no customs of intercourse in the Five Towns. All
the isolated prosperities of the district sprang from economising, hard
driven homes, in which there was neither time nor means for hospitality.
Social intercourse centred very largely upon the church or chapel,
and the chapels were better at bringing people together than the
Establishment to which my cousins belonged. Their chief outlet to the
wider world lay therefore through the acquaintances they had formed at
school, and through two much less prosperous families of relations who
lived at Longton and Hanley. A number of gossiping friendships with old
school mates were "kept up," and my cousins would "spend the afternoon"
or even spend the day with these; such occasions led to other encounters
and interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetings
that formed the emotional thread of their lives. When the billiard table
had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved friends for
an occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for glory and the
girls. Both of them played very well. They never, so far as I know,
dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic conflicts they began
to go to dances, they went with the quavering connivance of my aunt,
and changed into ball frocks at friends' houses on the way. There was a
tennis club that formed a convenient afternoon rendezvous, and I recall
that in the period of my earlier visits the young bloods of the district
found much satisfaction in taking girls for drives in dog-carts and
suchlike high-wheeled vehicles, a disposition that died in tangled
tandems at the apparition of motor-car's.

My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters at
all. In the undifferentiated industrial community from which they had
sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to them that
the concentration of property that had made them wealthy, had cut their
children off from the general social sea in which their own awkward
meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening any other world in
exchange. My uncle was too much occupied with the works and his business
affairs and his private vices to philosophise about his girls; he wanted
them just to keep girls, pref