scorched wall. It was a shabby stove, but not more
so than the other few articles of furniture--a large table, a small
desk, three deteriorated cane-chairs, two gas brackets, and an old
copying-press on its rickety stand. The sole object that could emerge
brightly from the ordeal of the gas-flare was a splendid freshly printed
blue poster gummed with stamp-paper to the wall: which poster bore the
words, in vast capitals of two sizes: "_The Five Towns Chronicle and
Turnhill Guardian_." Copies of this poster had also been fixed, face
outwards, on the two curtainless black windows, to announce to the
Market Square what was afoot in the top storey over the ironmonger's.

A young woman, very soberly attired, was straining at the double
iron-handles of the copying-press. Some copying-presses have a screw so
accurately turned and so well oiled, and handles so massively like a
fly-wheel, that a touch will send the handles whizzing round and round
till they stop suddenly, and then one slight wrench more, and the
letters are duly copied! But this was not such a press. It had been
outworn in Mr. Karkeek's office; rust had intensified its original
defects of design, and it produced the minimum of result with the
maximum of means. Nevertheless, the young woman loved it. She clenched
her hands and her teeth, and she frowned, as though she loved it. And
when she had sufficiently crushed the letter-book in the press, she
lovingly unscrewed and drew forth the book; and with solicitude she
opened the book on the smaller table, and tenderly detached the
blotting-paper from the damp tissue paper, and at last extracted the
copied letter and examined its surface.

"Smudged!" she murmured, tragic.

And the excellent ass Dayson, always facetiously cheerful, and without a
grain of humour, remarked:

"Copiousness with the H2O, Miss Lessways, is the father of smudged
epistles. I'm ready to go through these proofs with you as soon as you
are."

He was over thirty. He had had affairs with young women. He reckoned
that there remained little for him to learn. He had deliberately watched
this young woman at the press. He had clearly seen her staring under the
gas-jet at the copied letter. And yet in her fierce muscular movements,
and in her bendings and straightenings, and in her delicate caressings,
and in her savage scowlings and wrinklings, and in her rapt gazings, and
in all her awful absorption, he had quite failed to perceive the
terrible