She was richly dressed in a dark blue taffeta dress that gave brilliance to her tawny hair.  Perhaps she was over-richly dressed, for, like many girls who as a rule are not very interested in clothes, she was too interested in them at times, and inexperienced taste was apt to mislead her into an unfitness.  Also her figure was too stiff and sturdy to favour elegance.  But on this occasion the general effect of her was notably picturesque, and her face and hair, and the expression of her pose, atoned in their charm for the shortcomings and the luxuriance of the frock.  She was no more the Rachel that Mrs. Maldon had known and that Louis had first kissed.  Her glance had altered, and her gestures.  She would ask herself, could it be true that she was a married woman?  But her glance and gestures announced it true at every instant.  A new languor and a new confidence had transformed the girl.  Her body had been modified and her soul at once chastened and fired.  Fresh in her memory was endless matter for meditation.  And on the sofa, in a negligent attitude of repose, with shameless eyes gazing far into the caverns of the fire, and an unreadable faint smile on her face, she meditated.  And she was the most seductive, tantalizing, self-contradictory object for study in the whole of Bursley.  She had never been so interesting as in this brief period, and she might never be so interesting again.

Mrs. Tams entered.  With her voice Mrs. Tams said, “Shall I begin to clear all these things away, mam?” But with her self-conscious eyes Mrs. Tams said to the self-conscious eyes of Rachel, “What a staggering world we live in, don’t we?”

II

Rachel sprang from the Chesterfield, smoothed down her frock, shook her hair, and then ran upstairs to the large front bedroom, where Louis, to whom the house was just as much a toy as to Rachel, was about to knock a nail into a wall.  Out of breath, she stood close to him very happily.  The At Home was over.  She was now definitely received as a married woman in a town full of married women and girls waiting to be married women.  She had passed successfully through a trying and exhausting experience; the nervous tension was slackened.  And therefore it might be expected that she would have a sense of reaction, the vague melancholy which is produced when that which has long been seen before is suddenly seen behind.  But it was not so in the smallest degree.  Every moment of her existence equally was thrilling and happy.  One piquant joy was succeeded immediately by another as piquant.  To Rachel it was not in essence more exciting to officiate at an At Home than to watch Louis drive a nail into a wall.