her august
decisions.

The forenoon was better than the dawn. The sun had emerged; the
moisture had nearly disappeared, except in the road; and the impulse
of spring was moving in the trees and in the bodies of young women;
the sky showed a virginal blue; the wandering clouds were milky and
rounded, the breeze infinitely soft. It seemed to be in an earlier age
that the dark colliers had silently climbed the steep of Bycars
Lane amid the dankness and that the first column of smoke had risen
forlornly from the chimney.

In spite of her desolated heart, and of her primness, Rachel stepped
forward airily. She was going forth to an enormous event, namely, her
first apparition in the shopping streets of the town on a Saturday
morning as Mrs. Louis Fores, married woman. She might have postponed
it, but into what future? Moreover, she was ashamed of being diffident
about it. And, in the peculiar condition of her mind, she would have
been ashamed to let a spiritual crisis, however appalling, interfere
with the natural, obvious course of her duties. So far as the world
was concerned, she was a happy married woman, who had to make her
debut as a shopping housewife, and hence she was determined that her
debut should be made.... And yet, possibly she might not have ventured
away from the house at all, had she not felt that if she did not
escape for a time from its unbreathable atmosphere into the liberty of
the streets, she would stifle and expire. Wherever she put herself
in the house she could not feel alone. In the streets she felt alone,
even when saluting new acquaintances and being examined and probed by
their critical stare. The sight of these acquaintances reminded her
that she had a long list of calls to repay. And then the system of
paying calls and repaying, and the whole system of society, seemed
monstrously fanciful and unreal to her. There was only one reality.
The solid bricks of the pavement suddenly trembled under her feet as
though she were passing over a suspension-bridge. The enterprise of
shopping became idiotic, humorous, incredibly silly in the face of
that reality.

Nevertheless, the social system of Bursley, as exemplified in Wedgwood
Street and the market-place, its principal shopping thoroughfares, was
extremely alluring, bright, and invigorating that morning. It almost
intoxicated, and had, indeed, a similar effect to that of a sparkling
drink. Rachel had never shopped at large with her own money befo