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The day had been interminable, and the evening exasperating in the highest degree. What an evening! Why had Albert and Clara and Auntie Hamps all of them come up just at supper-time? At first they would not be persuaded! No! They had just called sheer accident! nothing abnormal! And yet the whole of the demeanour of Auntie Hamps and Clara was abnormal.
Soon afterwards aunt and nephew departed. "How very odd!" murmured Maggie, with an unusual intonation, in the hall, as Edwin was putting on his hat to return to the shop. But whether she was speaking to herself or to him, he knew not. "What?" he asked gruffly. "Well," she said, "isn't it?" She was more like Auntie Hamps, more like Clara, than herself in that moment.
They were impressed. They had to say to themselves: "There's something very decent about her, after all." Auntie Hamps looked from one to the other, and at the quiet opulence of the breakfast-table, and the spacious solidities of the room. Admiration and respect were in that eye, always too masculine to weep under emotion. Undoubtedly she was proud of her nephew and nieces.
Auntie Hamps, indeed, probably knew more than Edwin did, for she had thought fit to summon Dr Heve that very afternoon for an ailment of her own, and Clara, with an infant or so, had by a remarkable coincidence called at Mrs Hamps's house just after the doctor left. "Odious," thought Edwin.
Suddenly the drawing-room door was pushed open, without a sound, and Alicia, in all the bursting charm of her youthfulness and the delicious naivete of her self-importance, stood in the doorway. She made no gesture; she just looked at Edwin with a peculiar ominous and excited glance, and Edwin rose quickly and left the room. Auntie Hamps had noticed nothing.
"Oh!" cried Clara, genuinely startled. Mrs Hamps was sometimes thus astoundingly munificent. It was she who had given the schooner to Edwin. And her presents of elaborately enveloped and costly toilet soap on the birthdays of the children, and at Christmas, were massive. Yet Clara always maintained that she was the meanest old thing imaginable.
Late on another Saturday afternoon in the following March, when Darius had been ill nearly two years, he and Edwin and Albert were sitting round the remains of high tea together in the dining-room. Clara had not been able to accompany her husband on what was now the customary Saturday visit, owing to the illness of her fourth child. Mrs Hamps was fighting chronic rheumatism at home.
That is to say, one of the great ladies of Bursley, ranking in the popular regard with Mrs. Clayton-Vernon, the leader of society, Mrs. Sutton, the philanthropist, and Mrs. Hamps, the powerful religious bully. After eight-and-forty years of the Five Towns, Mrs.
From a long study of his character she had foreknown infallibly that in such a crisis as had supervened he would behave precisely as he had behaved. This attitude of Auntie Hamps, however, though it reduced the miraculous to the ordinary-expected, did not diminish Clara's ingenuous awe of Edwin. From a mocker, the child had been temporarily transformed into an unwilling hero-worshipper.
And Mr Orgreave only just out of bed, as you may say! ... That young lady must have her hands full! My word! What a blessing it is she has made such friends with Maggie!" Mrs Hamps had the peculiar gift, which developed into ever-increasing perfection as her hair grew whiter, of being able to express ideas by means of words which had no relation to them at all.
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