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She had a vision of the Five Towns as a smoky blotch on the remote horizon, negligible, crass, ridiculous in its heavy self-complacency. The very Orgreaves themselves were tinged with this odious English provincialism. He smiled to himself, and then said, very quietly: "It isn't of the least importance, you know. In fact I'm rather glad.
On the previous night, after hours of hesitation, he had suddenly walked forth and gone down Oak Street, and pushed open the garden gates of the Orgreaves, and gazed at the facade of the house not at her window, because that was at the side and it was all dark. The Orgreaves had gone to bed: he had expected it. Even this perfectly futile reconnaissance had calmed him.
He wished savagely that he had never seen her... No! no! He could not call on the Orgreaves that night. He could not do it. She might be out. And then... His father entered, and began to grumble. Both Edwin and Maggie had known since the beginning of dinner that Darius was quaking on the precipice of a bad bilious attack. Edwin listened to the rising storm of words.
He witnessed the smashing of one of them, and then he ran to the wall, and taking a spring, rested on it with his arms, his toes pushed into crevices. Young George, with hand outstretched to throw, in the garden of the Orgreaves, seemed rather diverted by this apparition. "Hello!" said Edwin. "What are you up to?" "I'm practising breaking crocks," said the child.
When he innocently said that he was `glad when the end came of a fugue, all the Orgreaves laughed heartily, but after laughing, Tom said that he knew what Edwin meant and quite agreed. It was while he was glancing along the untidy and crowded shelves with sophisticated eye that the door brusquely opened.
In so far as he saw Maggie at all, he saw her somehow mysteriously elegant and vivacious He did not see his father. His fancy had little relation to reality. But this did not mar his pleasure... Then he saw himself talking over the hedge, wittily, to amiable and witty persons in the garden of the Orgreaves.
Suddenly the door opened, and he saw the Orgreaves' servant, with a cloak over her white apron, and hands red with cold. And also he saw disaster like a ghostly figure following her. His heart sickeningly sank. Martha smiled and gave him a note, which he smilingly accepted. "Miss Lessways asked me to come down with this," she said confidentially.
There was something shameless in that word `professed. If the Freethinker had been ashamed of his freethinking, if he had sought to conceal it in phrases, the implication was that the case might not have been so bad. This was what astonished Edwin: the candour with which Bradlaugh's position was upheld in the dining-room of the Orgreaves.
Hilda seemed to be oblivious of Mrs Hamps's ejaculations, but immediately afterwards she straightened her back, with a gesture that Edwin knew, and staring into his eyes said, as it were resentfully "Well, they evidently aren't here!" And looked with scorn among the sightseers. It was clear that the crowd contained nobody of the rank and stamp of the Orgreaves.
This was mere futile bravado, for the impartial spectator in him, though far less clear-sighted and judicial now than formerly, foresaw with certainty that if Hilda did not come he would call at the Orgreaves'. At five minutes to seven he was miserable: he had decided to hope until five minutes to seven. He made it seven in despair.
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