him with a look that might mean anything. Did she raise her
cheek to his greeting, or was it fancy that she had endured, rather than
accepted, his kiss? He was scarcely sure. And if she had endured instead
of accepting the kiss, was her mood to be attributed to his lateness for
tea, or to the fact that she was aware of the episode of the geese? He
could not divine.

'Pikelets! Good!' he exclaimed, taking the cover off the dish.

This strong, successful, and dominant man adored his wife, and went in
fear of her. She was his first love, but his second spouse. They had
been married ten years. In those ten years they had quarrelled only five
times, and she had changed the very colour of his life. Till his second
marriage he had boasted that he belonged to the people and retained the
habits of the people. Clara, though she also belonged to the people,
very soon altered all that. Clara had a passion for the genteel. Like
many warm-hearted, honest, clever, and otherwise sensible persons, Clara
was a snob, but a charming little snob. She ordered him to forget that
he belonged to the people. She refused to listen when he talked in the
dialect. She made him dress with opulence, and even with tidiness; she
made him buy a fashionable house and fill it with fine furniture; she
made him buy a brougham in which her gentility could pay calls and do
shopping (she shopped in Oldcastle, where a decrepit aristocracy of
tradesmen sneered at Hanbridge's lack of style); she had her 'day'; she
taught the servants to enter the reception-rooms without knocking; she
took tea in bed in the morning, and tea in the afternoon in the
drawing-room. She would have instituted dinner at seven, but she was a
wise woman, and realized that too much tyranny often means revolution
and the crumbling of-thrones; therefore the ancient plebeian custom of
high tea at six was allowed to persist and continue.

She it was who had compelled Josiah (or bewitched, beguiled, coaxed and
wheedled him), after a public refusal, to accept the unusual post of
Deputy-Mayor. In two years' time he might count on being Mayor. Why,
then, should Clara have been so anxious for this secondary dignity?
Because, in that year of royal festival, Bursley, in common with many
other boroughs, had had a fancy to choose a Mayor out of the House of
Lords. The Earl of Chell, a magnate of the county, had consented to wear
the mayoral chain and dispense the mayoral hospitalities on condition
tha