“Well, you can’t help the colour of your hair.  So I’ll keep my nerve.”

“I didn’t expect to be insulted!” cried Rachel, flushing far redder than that rich hair of hers, and paced pompously out of the room, her face working violently.  The door was ajar.  She passed Mrs. Tams on the stairs, blindly, with lowered head.

V

In the conjugal bedroom, full of gas-glare and shadows, there were two old women.  One was Mrs. Tams, ministering; the other was Rachel Fores, once and not long ago the beloved and courted girlish Louise of a chevalier, now aged by all the sorrow of the world.  She lay in bed—­in her bed nearest the fireplace and farthest from the door.

She had undressed herself with every accustomed ceremony, arranging each article of attire, including the fine frock left on the bed, carefully in its place, as is meet in a chamber where tidiness depends on the loyal cooperation of two persons, but through her tears.  She had slipped sobbing into bed.  The other bed was empty, and its emptiness seemed sinister to her.  Would it ever be occupied again?  Impossible that it should ever be occupied again!  Its rightful occupant was immeasurably far off, along miles of passages, down leagues of stairs, separated by impregnable doors, in another universe, the universe of the ground floor.  Of course she might have sprung up, put on her enchanting dressing-gown, tripped down a few steps in a moment of time, and peeped in at the parlour door—­just peeped in, in that magic ribboned peignoir, and glanced—­and the whole planet would have been reborn.  But she could not.  If the salvation of the human race had depended on it, she could not—­partly because she was a native of the Five Towns, where such things are not done, and no doubt partly because she was just herself.

She was now more grieved than angry with Louis.  He had been wrong; he was a foolish, unreliable boy—­but he was a boy.  Whereas she was his mother, and ought to have known better.  Yes, she had become his mother in the interval.  For herself she experienced both pity and anger.  What angered her was her clumsiness.  Why had she lost her temper and her head?  She saw clearly how she might have brought him round to her view with a soft phrase, a peculiar inflection, a tiny appeal, a caress, a mere dimpling of the cheek.  She saw him revolving on her little finger....  She knew all things now because she was so old.  And then suddenly she was bathing luxuriously in self-pity, and young and imperious, and violently resentful of the insult which he had put upon her—­an insult which recalled the half-forgotten humiliations of her school-days, when loutish girls had baptized her with the name of a vegetable....  And then, again suddenly, she deeply desired that Louis should come upstairs and bully her.