ley, and then the walk up Trafalgar
Road, amid the familiar high chimneys and the smoke and the clayey mud
and the football posts and the Midland accent, all by myself. And there
was leisure to consider anew how I should break to my mother the
tremendous news I had for her. I had been considering that question
ever since getting into the train at Euston, where I had said goodbye
to Agnes; but in the atmosphere of the Five Towns it seemed just
slightly more difficult; though, of course, it wasn't difficult, really.

You see, I wrote to my mother regularly every week, telling her most of
my doings. She knew all my friends by name. I dare say she formed in
her mind notions of what sort of people they were. Thus I had
frequently mentioned Agnes and her family in my letters. But you can't
write even to your mother and say in cold blood: 'I think I am
beginning to fall in love with Agnes,' 'I think Agnes likes me,' 'I am
mad on her,' 'I feel certain she likes me,' 'I shall propose to her on
such a day.' You can't do that. At least I couldn't. Hence it had come
about that on the 20th of December I had proposed to Agnes and been
accepted by Agnes, and my mother had no suspicion that my happiness was
so near. And on the 22nd, by a previous and unalterable arrangement, I
had come to spend Christmas with my mother.

I was the only son of a widow; I was all that my mother had. And lo! I
had gone and engaged myself to a girl she had never seen, and I had
kept her in the dark! She would certainly be extremely surprised, and
she might be a little bit hurt--just at first. Anyhow, the situation
was the least in the world delicate.

I walked up the whitened front steps of my mother's little house, just
opposite where the electric cars stop, but before I could put my hand
on the bell my little plump mother, in her black silk and her gold
brooch and her auburn hair, opened to me, having doubtless watched me
down the road from the bay-window, as usual, and she said, as usual
kissing me--

'Well, Philip! How are you?'

And I said--

'Oh! I'm all right, mother. How are you?'

I perceived instantly that she was more excited than my arrival
ordinarily made her. There were tears in her smiling eyes, and she was
as nervous as a young girl. She did indeed look remarkably young for a
woman of forty-five, with twenty-five years of widowhood and a brief
but too tempestuous married life behind her.

The thought flashed across my mind: 'By so