“It wouldn’t be quite suitable.”

“Why not, mother?” the girl demanded with a sort of ferocity.  She had now quitted the range.  A man’s feet twinkled past the window.

Mrs. Baines was startled and surprised.  Sophia’s attitude was really very trying; her manners deserved correction.  But it was not these phenomena which seriously affected Mrs. Baines; she was used to them and had come to regard them as somehow the inevitable accompaniment of Sophia’s beauty, as the penalty of that surpassing charm which occasionally emanated from the girl like a radiance.  What startled and surprised Mrs. Baines was the perfect and unthinkable madness of Sophia’s infantile scheme.  It was a revelation to Mrs. Baines.  Why in the name of heaven had the girl taken such a notion into her head?  Orphans, widows, and spinsters of a certain age suddenly thrown on the world—­these were the women who, naturally, became teachers, because they had to become something.  But that the daughter of comfortable parents, surrounded by love and the pleasures of an excellent home, should wish to teach in a school was beyond the horizons of Mrs. Baines’s common sense.  Comfortable parents of to-day who have a difficulty in sympathizing with Mrs. Baines, should picture what their feelings would be if their Sophias showed a rude desire to adopt the vocation of chauffeur.

“It would take you too much away from home,” said Mrs. Baines, achieving a second pie.

She spoke softly.  The experience of being Sophia’s mother for nearly sixteen years had not been lost on Mrs. Baines, and though she was now discovering undreamt-of dangers in Sophia’s erratic temperament, she kept her presence of mind sufficiently well to behave with diplomatic smoothness.  It was undoubtedly humiliating to a mother to be forced to use diplomacy in dealing with a girl in short sleeves.  In her day mothers had been autocrats.  But Sophia was Sophia.

“What if it did?” Sophia curtly demanded.

“And there’s no opening in Bursley,” said Mrs. Baines.

“Miss Chetwynd would have me, and then after a time I could go to her sister.”

“Her sister?  What sister?”

“Her sister that has a big school in London somewhere.”

Mrs. Baines covered her unprecedented emotions by gazing into the oven at the first pie.  The pie was doing well, under all the circumstances.  In those few seconds she reflected rapidly and decided that to a desperate disease a desperate remedy must be applied.

London!  She herself had never been further than Manchester.  London, ‘after a time’!  No, diplomacy would be misplaced in this crisis of Sophia’s development!