uld never reach an exchange
of general ideas; they never had done. He did not think that Clara had
any general ideas.

"I hear you're getting frightfully thick with the Orgreaves," Clara
observed, with a malicious accent and smile, as if to imply that he was
getting frightfully above himself, and--simultaneously--that the
Orgreaves were after all no better than other people.

"Who told you that?" He walked towards the doorway uneasily. The worst
was that he could not successfully pretend that these sisterly attacks
were lost on him.

"Never mind who told me," said Clara.

Her voice took on a sudden charming roguish quality, and he could hear
again the girl of fourteen. His heart at once softened to her. The
impartial and unmoved spectator that sat somewhere in Edwin, as in
everybody who possesses artistic sensibility, watching his secret life
as from a conning tower, thought how strange this was. He stared out
into the street. And then a face appeared at the aperture left by the
removed shutter. It was Janet Orgreave's, and it hesitated. Edwin gave
a nervous start.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

Janet was all in white again, and her sunshade was white, with regular
circular holes in it to let through spots of sunlight which flecked her
face. Edwin had not recovered from the blow of her apparition just at
that moment, when he saw Hilda Lessways beyond her. Hilda was
slate-coloured, and had a black sunshade. His heart began to thump; it
might have been a dramatic and dangerous crisis that had suddenly come
about. And to Edwin the situation did in fact present itself as
critical: his sister behind, and these two so different girls in front.
Yet there was nothing critical in it whatsoever. He shook hands as in a
dream, wondering what he should do, trying to summon out of himself the
man of the world.

"Do come in," he urged them, hoping they would refuse.

"Oh no. We mustn't come in," said Janet, smiling gratefully. Hilda did
not smile; she had not even smiled in shaking hands; and she had shaken
hands without conviction.

Edwin heard a hurried step in the shop, and then the voice of Maggie,
maternal and protective, in a low exclamation of surprise: "You, dear!"
And then the sound of a smacking kiss, and Clara's voice, thin, weak,
and confiding: "Yes, I've come." "Come upstairs, do!" said Maggie
imploringly. "Come and be comfortable." Then st