unhappiness. The experience alternated between the unreal and the
real. The extraordinary complexity of life was beginning to put its
spell on her. She could not determine the relative values of the
various facets of the experience.

When she had done the important parts of her business, she thought she
would go into the covered market, which, having one entrance in
the market-place and another in Wedgwood Street, connects the two
thoroughfares. She had never been into the covered market because
Mrs. Maldon had a prejudice against its wares. She went out of mere
curiosity, just to enlarge her knowledge of her adopted town. The huge
interior, with its glazed roof, was full of clatter, shouting, and
the smell of innumerable varieties of cheese. She passed a second-hand
bookstall without seeing it, and then discerned admirable potatoes at
three-halfpence a peck less than she had been paying--and Mrs. Maldon
was once more set down as an old lady with peculiarities. However, by
the time Rachel had made a critical round of the entire place, with
its birds in cages, popular songs at a penny, sweetstuffs, cheap
cottons and woollens, bright tinware, colonial fleshmeat, sausage
displays, and particularly its cheeses, Mrs. Maldon was already
recovering her reputation as a woman whose death was an irreparable
loss to the town.

As Rachel passed the negligible second-hand bookstall again, it was
made visible to her by the fact that Councillor Thomas Batchgrew was
just emerging from the shop behind it, with a large volume in his
black-gloved hands. Thomas Batchgrew came out of the dark bookshop
as a famous old actor, accustomed to decades of crude public worship,
comes out of a fashionable restaurant into a fashionable thoroughfare.
His satisfied and self-conscious countenance showed that he knew
that nearly everybody in sight was or ought to be acquainted with his
identity and his renown, and showed also that his pretence of being
unaware of this tremendous and luscious fact was playful and not
seriously meant to deceive a world of admirers. He was wearing a light
tweed suit, with a fancy waistcoat and a hard, pale-grey hat. As he
aged, his tendency to striking pale attire was becoming accentuated;
at any rate, it had the advantage of harmonizing with his unique
whiskers--those whiskers which differentiated him from all the rest of
the human race in the Five Towns.

Rachel blushed, partly because he was suddenly so close to her