mince-pies and
claret-cup in the small breakfast-room; people mumbled about _her_
between munches.

_She_, having been sustained with turkey and beer in the kitchen, was
led by the backstairs up to Vera's very boudoir, that being the only
suitable room. And there she waited. She was a woman of about
forty-five; fat, unfair (in the physical sense), and untidy. Of her
hands the less said the better. She had probably never visited a
professional coiffeur in her life. Her form was straitly confined in an
atrocious dress of linsey-woolsey, and she wore an apron that was
neither white nor black. Her boots were commodious. After her meal she
was putting a hat-pin to a purpose which hat-pins do not usually serve.
She gained an honest living by painting green leaves on yellow
wash-basins in Stephen's renowned earthenware manufactory. She spoke the
dialect of the people. She had probably never heard of Christian
Science, bridge, Paquin, Panhard, Father Vaughan, the fall of consols,
osprey plumes, nor the new theology. Nobody in the house knew her name;
even Stephen had forgotten it. And yet the whole house was agog
concerning her.

The fact was that in the painting-shops of the various manufactories
where she had painted green leaves on yellow wash-basins (for in all her
life she had done little else) she possessed a reputation as a prophet,
seer, oracle, fortune-teller--what you will. Polite persons would
perhaps never have heard of her reputation, the toiling millions of the
Five Towns being of a rather secretive nature in such matters, had not
the subject of fortune-telling been made prominent in the district by
the celebrated incident of the fashionable palmist. The fashionable
palmist, having thriven enormously in Bond Street, had undertaken a tour
through the provinces and had stopped several days at Hanbridge (our
metropolis), where he had an immense vogue until the Hanbridge police
hit on the singular idea of prosecuting him for an unlawful vagabond.
Stripped of twenty pounds odd in the guise of a fine and costs, and
having narrowly missed the rigours of our county jail, that fashionable
palmist and soothsayer had returned to Bond Street full of hate and
respect for Midland justice, which fears not and has a fist like a
navvy's. The attention of the Five Towns had thus been naturally drawn
to fortune-telling in general. And it was deemed that in securing a
local celebrity (quite an amateur, and therefore, it was uncert