part of the first
decade of the twentieth century. When we meet them first they are
young girls--fifteen and sixteen--"rather like racehorses, quivering
with delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; exquisite, enchanting
proof of the circulation of the blood; innocent, artful, roguish,
prim, gushing, ignorant, and miraculously wise"--at an age when "if
one is frank, one must admit that one has nothing to learn: one has
learnt simply everything in the previous six months." These two young
people are unconscious of "the miraculous age which is us." They lived
in the Potteries before the Potteries had acquired that big black
spot on the map which now dignifies and degrades their existence. They
lived in and around the important draper's shop in "The Square," under
the wing of their respected parents, the once active citizen, now
paralytic, Mr. Baines, and Mrs. Baines, the ruler, the dictator of the
household and of the morals of all its members.

In the first stage we see Constance and Sophia subject to this
parental rule. They take castor oil when they are bidden. They do not
leave the house without the sanction of Mrs. Baines. They must not,
needless to say, realise the fact that marriageable young men are real
facts. They must pay attention to the shop, preserving a proper
distance from the assistants. They must be careful that Maggie, the
servant, does not overhear familiar conversations. They must not go
into the drawing-room except on Sunday afternoons. They must wait upon
the paralytic father with proper punctilio. And they must be quiet and
attentive when Mrs. Baines is directing their morals. Then Mr. Baines
dies, because Sophia has been looking out of the window at a dashing
commercial traveller; and Mr. Bennett soliloquises:

John Baines had belonged to the past, to the age when men really
did think of their souls, when orators by phrases could move
crowds to fury or to pity, when no one had learnt to hurry, when
Demos was only turning in his sleep, when the sole beauty of
life resided in its inflexible and slow dignity, when hell
really had no bottom and a gilt-clasped Bible really was the
secret of England's greatness. Mid-Victorian England lay on
that mahogany bed. Ideals had passed away with John Baines. It
is thus that ideals die; not in the conventional pageantry of
honoured death, but sorrily, ignobly, while one's head is
turned.

But the generation of the B