outhful schoolmaster said to me:

"Good-looking woman that, eh, boy? Married three weeks ago," he added.

A piece of information which took the keen edge off my interest in her.

"Really!" I said. "Who is she?"

"Married to a Scotsman named Macintyre, I fancy."

"That tells me nothing," I said. "Who was she?"

"Daughter of a man named Roden."

"Not Herbert Roden?" I demanded.

"Yes. Art director at Jacksons, Limited."

"Well, well!" I exclaimed. "So Herbert Roden's got a daughter married.
Well, well! And it seems like a week ago that he and his uncle--you
know all about that affair, of course?"

"What affair?"

"Why, the Roden affair!"

"No," said my schoolmaster.

"You don't mean to say you've never--"

Nothing pleases a wandering native of the Five Towns more than to come
back and find that he knows things concerning the Five Towns which
another man who has lived there all his life doesn't know. In ten
seconds I was digging out for my schoolmaster one of those family
histories which lie embedded in the general grey soil of the past like
lumps of quartz veined and streaked with the precious metal of passion
and glittering here and there with the crystallizations of scandal.

"You could make a story out of that," he said, when I had done talking
and he had done laughing.

"It is a story," I replied. "It doesn't want any making."

And this is just what I told him. I have added on a few explanations and
moral reflections--and changed the names.

I

Silas Roden, commonly called Si Roden--Herbert's uncle--lived in one of
those old houses at Paddock Place, at the bottom of the hill where
Hanbridge begins. Their front steps are below the level of the street,
and their backyards look out on the Granville Third Pit and the works of
the Empire Porcelain Company. 11 was Si's own house, a regular
bachelor's house, as neat as a pin, and Si was very proud of it and very
particular about it. Herbert, being an orphan, lived with his uncle. He
would be about twenty-five then, and Si fifty odd. Si had retired from
the insurance agency business, and Herbert, after a spell in a lawyer's
office, had taken to art and was in the decorating department at
Jackson's. They had got on together pretty well, had Si and Herbert, in
a grim, taciturn, Five Towns way. The historical scandal began when
Herbert wanted to marry Alice Oulsnam, an orphan like himself, employed
at a dress-maker's in Crown Square, Hanbridge.

"Th