aineses does not give place easily; it
tries to shut its ears to the knocking at the door, insistently as it
may knock in the whimsical, assertive personality of Sophia. The
romantic commercial traveller whose fault it was that Mr. Baines died
a premature, though, scientifically speaking, a belated death, is the
symbol of the new influence which Mrs. Baines is too out-of-date to
resist. Sophia runs away with the commercial traveller, makes him
marry her, and is translated from "The Square" to Paris. Poor Sophia!
She is the victim of being half a generation ahead of her time, a
suffragette before it was an honour to be a martyr to the cause. But
in Constance the old influences are stronger. She persists like a
piece of old furniture which survives the relic-hunters and the
broker's men. She marries that trusted servant, Mr. Povey, who has
such a head for inventing tickets and labels and sign-boards, who
himself outdistances Mr. Baines as railway trains outdistance stage
coaches, and as aeroplanes will outdistance motor-cars. The married
couple naturally displace Mrs. Baines, and Constance notices her
mother shortly after the honeymoon--"Poor dear!" she thought, "I'm
afraid she's not what she was." "Incredible that her mother could have
aged in less than six weeks! Constance did not allow for the chemistry
that had been going on in herself."

And so they go on, till Mr. Povey is "forty next birthday," though,
dear innocent soul, he scarcely notices it as we notice it tragically
in these days of quick living. And Constance buries her mother, and
becomes engrossed in Cyril, her son, and scarcely observes how the
atmosphere in the Potteries gets blacker and blacker, and the trains
run nearer and more frequently, and the electric trams replace the
horse trams, linking up the Five Towns of the "District." And Mr.
Povey too gets buried, and Constance's son goes to London, and her
hair grows white, and at last--at last Sophia comes back to live with
her in the old house in the modern Potteries. And still those two old
women are living there together.

I shall not dwell upon the career of Sophia--who has pursued her life
in Paris very wisely, shrewdly, circumspectly, not to say
commercially, thus showing how honest bourgeois ancestry can triumph
over the flightiest of modern temperaments. Suffice it that she is now
an aged widow, a contemporary of the Crimean veterans, living to this
day in comfortable and old-maidish sobriety