ould not! She wished to do so, but she could not
command her limbs. She just sat there, in horridest torture, like a
stoical fly on a pin--one of those flies that pretend that nothing
hurts. The agony might have been prolonged to centuries had not an
extremely startling and dramatic thing happened--the most startling and
dramatic thing that ever happened either to James Ollerenshaw or to the
young woman. James Ollerenshaw spoke, and I imagine that nobody was more
surprised than James Ollerenshaw by his brief speech, which slipped out
of him quite unawares. What he said was:

"Well, lass, how goes it, like?"

If the town could have heard him, the town would have rustled from
boundary to boundary with agitated and delicious whisperings.

The young woman, instead of being justly incensed by this monstrous
molestation from an aged villain who had not been introduced to her,
gave a little jump (as though relieved from the spell of an
enchantment), and then deliberately turned and faced Mr. Ollerenshaw.
She also smiled, amid her roses.

"Very well indeed, thank you," she replied, primly, but nicely.

Upon this, they both of them sought to recover--from an affair that had
occurred in the late seventies.

In the late seventies James Ollerenshaw had been a young-old man of
nearly thirty. He had had a stepbrother, much older and much poorer than
himself, and the stepbrother had died, leaving a daughter, named Susan,
almost, but not quite, in a state of indigence. The stepbrother and
James had not been on terms of effusive cordiality. But James was
perfectly ready to look after Susan, his stepniece. Susan, aged
seventeen years, was, however, not perfectly ready to be looked after.
She had a little money, and she earned a little (by painting asters on
toilet ware), and the chit was very rude to her stepuncle. In less than
a year she had married a youth of twenty, who apparently had not in him
even the rudiments of worldly successfulness. James Ollerenshaw did his
avuncular duty by formally and grimly protesting against the marriage.
But what authority has a stepuncle? Susan defied him, with a maximum of
unforgettable impoliteness; and she went to live with her husband at
Longshaw, which is at the other end of the Five Towns. The fact became
public that a solemn quarrel existed between James and Susan, and that
each of them had sworn not to speak until the other spoke. James would
have forgiven, if she had hinted at reconcilia