res as in a dream, without even
offering her own penny, though as a rule she was touchily punctilious in
sharing expenses with the sumptuous Janet. Without being in the least
aware of it, and quite innocently, Janet had painted a picture of the
young man, Edwin Clayhanger, which intensified a hundredfold the strong
romantic piquancy of Hilda's brief vision of him. In an instant Hilda
saw her ideal future--that future which had loomed grandiose,
indefinite, and strange--she saw it quite precise and simple as the wife
of such a creature as Edwin Clayhanger. The change was astounding in its
abruptness. She saw all the delightful and pure vistas of love with a
man, subtle, baffling, and benevolent, and above all superior; with a
man who would be respected by a whole town as a pillar of society, while
bringing to his intimacy with herself an exotic and wistful quality
which neither she nor anyone could possibly define. She asked: "What
attracts me in him? I don't know. _I like him_." She who had never
spoken to him! She who never before had vividly seen herself as married
to a man! He was clever; he was sincere; he was kind; he was
trustworthy; he would have wealth and importance and reputation. All
this was good; but all this would have been indifferent to her, had
there not been an enigmatic and inscrutable and unprecedented something
in his face, in his bearing, which challenged and inflamed her
imagination.

It did not occur to her to think of Janet as in the future a married
woman. But of herself she thought, with new agitations: "I am innocent
now! I am ignorant now! I am a girl now! But one day I shall be so no
longer. One day I shall be a woman. One day I shall be in the power and
possession of some man--if not this man, then some other. Everything
happens; and this will happen!" And the hazardous strangeness of life
enchanted her.

CHAPTER IV
WITH THE ORGREAVES

I

The Orgreave family was holding its nightly session in the large
drawing-room of Lane End House when Hilda and Janet arrived. The
bow-window stood generously open in three different places, and the
heavy outer curtains as well as the lace inner ones were moving gently
in the capricious breeze that came across the oval lawn. The
multitudinous sound of rain on leaves entered also with the wind; and a
steam-car could be heard thundering down Trafalgar Road, from which the
house was separated by only a few intervening minor roofs.

Mrs. Orgrea