ied a policeman. Trafalgar Road was a
solitude of bright and forlorn gas lamps and dark, excluding facades.

Suddenly he came to the corner of Wedgwood Street. He had started from
Bleakridge; he had arrived at home: the interval between these two
events was a perfect blank, save for the policeman. He could not recall
having walked all the way down the road. And as he put the key into the
door he was not in the least disturbed by the thought that his father
might not have gone to bed. He went upstairs with a certain swaggering
clatter, as who should say to all sleepers and bullies: "You be damned!
I don't care for any of you! Something's happened to me."

And he mused: "If anybody had told me this afternoon that before
midnight I should--"

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TEN.

THE CENTENARY.

It was immediately after this that the "Centenary"--mispronounced in
every manner conceivable--began to obsess the town. Superior and aloof
persons, like the Orgreaves, had for weeks heard a good deal of vague
talk about the Centenary from people whom intellectually they despised,
and had condescended to the Centenary as an amiable and excusable affair
which lacked interest for them. They were wrong. Edwin had gone
further, and had sniffed at the Centenary, to everybody except his
father. And Edwin was especially wrong. On the antepenultimate day of
June he first uneasily suspected that he had committed a fault of
appraisement. That was when his father brusquely announced that by
request of the Mayor all places of business in the town would be closed
in honour of the Centenary. It was the Centenary of the establishment
of Sunday schools.

Edwin hated Sunday schools. Nay, he venomously resented them, though
they had long ceased to incommode him. They were connected in his
memory with atrocious tedium, pietistic insincerity, and humiliating
contacts. At the bottom of his mind he still regarded them as a
malicious device of parents for wilfully harassing and persecuting
inoffensive, helpless children. And he had a particular grudge against
them because he alone of his father's offspring had been chosen for the
nauseating infliction. Why should his sisters have been spared and he
doomed? He became really impatient when Sunday schools were under
discussion, and from mere irrational annoyance he would not admit that
Sunday schools had any good qualities whatever. He knew nothing of
their history, and wished to know not