l scrupulous housewife's notion of a lodging-house
interior. It was suspect. And in Edwin there was a good deal of the
housewife. He was appalled. Obviously the house was small--he had
known that from the outside--and the entire enterprise insignificant.
This establishment was not in the King's Road, nor on the Marine Parade,
nor at Hove; no doubt hundreds of such little places existed
precariously in a vast town like Brighton. Widows, of course, were
often in straits. And Janet had told him... Nevertheless he was
appalled, and completely at a loss to reconcile Hilda with her
environment. And then--"the broker's man!"

At her bidding he sat down, in his overcoat, with his hat insecure on
his knee, and observed, under the lamp, the dust on the surface of the
long table. Hilda seated herself opposite, so that the lamp was between
them, hiding him from her by its circle of light. He wondered what
Maggie would have thought, and what Clara would have said, could they
have seen him in that obscurity.

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

THREE.

"So you've seen my boy?" she began, with no softening of tone.

"Yes, Janet Orgreave brought him in one morning--the other day. He
didn't seem to me to be so ill as all that."

"Ill!" she exclaimed. "He certainly wasn't ill when he left here. But
he had been. And the doctor said that this air didn't suit him--it
never had suited him. It doesn't suit some folks, you know--people can
say what they like."

"Anyhow, he's a lively piece--no mistake about that!"

"When he's well, he's very well," said George's mother. "But he's up
and down in a minute. And on the whole he's been on the poorly side."

He noticed that, though there was no relapse from the correctness of her
accent, she was using just such phrases as she might have used had she
never quitted her native Turnhill. He looked round the lamp at her
furtively, and seemed to see in her shadowed face a particular local
quality of sincerity and downrightness that appealed strongly to his
admiration. (Yet ten years earlier he had considered her markedly
foreign to the Five Towns.) That this quality should have survived in
her was a proof to him that she was a woman unique. Unique she had
been, and unique she still remained. He did not know that he had long
ago lost for ever the power of seeing her with a normal vision. He
imagined in his simplicity, which disguised it