till a child in heart and soul, she saw herself ageing, and then
aged, and then withered. Her twenty-first birthday was well above the
horizon. Soon, soon, she would be 'over twenty-one'! And she was not yet
born! That was it! She was not yet born! If the passionate strength of
desire could have done the miracle time would have stood still in the
heavens while Hilda sought the way of life.

And withal she was not wholly unhappy. Just as her attitude to her
mother was self-contradictory, so was her attitude towards existence.
Sometimes this profound infelicity of hers changed its hues for an
instant, and lo! it was bliss that she was bathed in. A phenomenon which
disconcerted her! She did not know that she had the most precious of all
faculties, the power to feel intensely.

III

Mr. Skellorn did not come; he was most definitely late.

From the window of her bedroom, at the front of the house, Hilda looked
westwards up toward the slopes of Chatterley Wood, where as a child she
used to go with other children to pick the sparse bluebells that thrived
on smoke. The bailiwick of Turnhill lay behind her; and all the murky
district of the Five Towns, of which Turnhill is the northern outpost,
lay to the south. At the foot of Chatterley Wood the canal wound in
large curves on its way towards the undefiled plains of Cheshire and the
sea. On the canal-side, exactly opposite to Hilda's window, was a
flour-mill, that sometimes made nearly as much smoke as the kilns and
chimneys closing the prospect on either hand. From the flour-mill a
bricked path, which separated a considerable row of new cottages from
their appurtenant gardens, led straight into Lessways Street, in front
of Mrs. Lessways' house. By this path Mr. Skellorn should have arrived,
for he inhabited the farthest of the cottages.

Hilda held Mr. Skellorn in disdain, as she held the row of cottages in
disdain. It seemed to her that Mr. Skellorn and the cottages
mysteriously resembled each other in their primness, their smugness,
their detestable self-complacency. Yet those cottages, perhaps thirty in
all, had stood for a great deal until Hilda, glancing at them, shattered
them with her scorn. The row was called Freehold Villas: a consciously
proud name in a district where much of the land was copyhold and could
only change owners subject to the payment of 'fines' and to the feudal
consent of a 'court' presided over by the agent of a lord of the manor.
Most of the d