This Bourneville was germane to that matter.  It had been an attempt on the part of a private firm of manufacturers to improve the housing of their workers.  To our ideas to-day it would seem the feeblest of benevolent efforts, but at the time it was extraordinary and famous, and people came long journeys to see its trim cottages with baths sunk under the kitchen floors (of all conceivable places), and other brilliant inventions.  No one seemed to see the danger to liberty in that aggressive age, that might arise through making workpeople tenants and debtors of their employer, though an Act called the Truck Act had long ago intervened to prevent minor developments in the same direction. . . .  But I and my chance acquaintance seemed that night always to have been aware of that possibility, and we had no doubt in our minds of the public nature of the housing duty.  Our interest lay rather in the possibility of common nurseries and kitchens and public rooms that should economize toil and give people space and freedom.

It was very interesting, but still a little cheerless, and when I lay in bed that night I thought of Nettie and the queer modifications of preference she had made, and among other things and in a way, I prayed.  I prayed that night, let me confess it, to an image I had set up in my heart, an image that still serves with me as a symbol for things inconceivable, to a Master Artificer, the unseen captain of all who go about the building of the world, the making of mankind.

But before and after I prayed I imagined I was talking and reasoning and meeting again with Nettie. . . .  She never came into the temple of that worshiping with me.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

MY MOTHER’S LAST DAYS

Section 1

Next day I came home to Clayton.

The new strange brightness of the world was all the brighter there, for the host of dark distressful memories, of darkened childhood, toilsome youth, embittered adolescence that wove about the place for me.  It seemed to me that I saw morning there for the first time.  No chimneys smoked that day, no furnaces were burning, the people were busy with other things.  The clear strong sun, the sparkle in the dustless air, made a strange gaiety in the narrow streets.  I passed a number of smiling people coming home from the public breakfasts that were given in the Town Hall until better things could be arranged, and happened on Parload among them.  “You were right about that comet,” I sang out at the sight of him; and he came toward me and clasped my hand.

“What are people doing here?” said I.

“They’re sending us food from outside,” he said, “and we’re going to level all these slums—­and shift into tents on to the moors;” and he began to tell me of many things that were being arranged, the Midland land committees had got to work with remarkable celerity and directness of purpose, and the redistribution of population was already in its broad outlines planned.  He was working at an improvised college of engineering.  Until schemes of work were made out, almost every one was going to school again to get as much technical training as they could against the demands of the huge enterprise of reconstruction that was now beginning.