dn't be bad uns, that's what I say. No man was
ever that bad wi' me but what he got it back again. Not but what they're
a lousy lot, there's no denying it."

"But they're all right really, aren't they?" he asked.

"Well, they're a bit different from women," she answered.

"Would you care to be back at Jordan's?" he asked Clara.

"I don't think so," she replied.

"Yes, she would!" cried her mother; "thank her stars if she could get
back. Don't you listen to her. She's for ever on that 'igh horse of
hers, an' it's back's that thin an' starved it'll cut her in two one of
these days."

Clara suffered badly from her mother. Paul felt as if his eyes were
coming very wide open. Wasn't he to take Clara's fulminations so
seriously, after all? She spun steadily at her work. He experienced a
thrill of joy, thinking she might need his help. She seemed denied and
deprived of so much. And her arm moved mechanically, that should never
have been subdued to a mechanism, and her head was bowed to the lace,
that never should have been bowed. She seemed to be stranded there
among the refuse that life has thrown away, doing her jennying. It was
a bitter thing to her to be put aside by life, as if it had no use for
her. No wonder she protested.

She came with him to the door. He stood below in the mean street,
looking up at her. So fine she was in her stature and her bearing, she
reminded him of Juno dethroned. As she stood in the doorway, she winced
from the street, from her surroundings.

"And you will go with Mrs. Hodgkisson to Hucknall?"

He was talking quite meaninglessly, only watching her. Her grey eyes at
last met his. They looked dumb with humiliation, pleading with a kind of
captive misery. He was shaken and at a loss. He had thought her high and
mighty.

When he left her, he wanted to run. He went to the station in a sort of
dream, and was at home without realising he had moved out of her street.

He had an idea that Susan, the overseer of the Spiral girls, was about
to be married. He asked her the next day.

"I say, Susan, I heard a whisper of your getting married. What about
it?"

Susan flushed red.

"Who's been talking to you?" she replied.

"Nobody. I merely heard a whisper that you WERE thinking--"

"Well, I am, though you needn't tell anybody. What's more, I wish I
wasn't!"

"Nay, Susan, you won't make me believe that."

"Shan't I? You CAN believe it, though. I'd rather stop here a thousand
times."