This document, harmless enough, and surely a proof of laudable aspirations in Louis, gravely displeased the different, inimical Rachel, and was used by her for bellicose purposes.

“So that’s it, is it?” she said ominously.

“But wasn’t it understood that we were to go to the Old Church?” said the other Louis, full of ingenious innocence.

“Oh!  Was it?”

“Didn’t I mention it?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I’m sure I did.”

The truth was that Louis had once casually remarked that he supposed they would attend the Old Church.  Rachel would have joyously attended any church or any chapel with him.  At Knype she had irregularly attended the Bethesda Chapel—­sometimes (in the evenings) with her father, oftener alone, never with her brother.  During her brief employment with Mrs. Maldon she had been only once to a place of worship, the new chapel in Moorthorne Road, which was the nearest to Bycars and had therefore been favoured by Mrs. Maldon when her limbs were stiff.  In the abstract she approved of religious rites.  Theologically her ignorance was such that she could not have distinguished between the tenets of church and the tenets of chapel, and this ignorance she shared with the large majority of the serious inhabitants of the Five Towns.  Why, then, should she have “pulled a face” (as the saying down there is) at the Old Parish Church?

One reason, which would have applied equally to church or chapel, was that she was disconcerted and even alarmed by Louis’ manifest tendency to settle down into utter correctness.  Louis had hitherto been a devotee of joy—­never as a bachelor had he done aught to increase the labour of churchwardens—­and it was somehow as a devotee of joy that Rachel had married him.  Rachel had been settled down all her life, and naturally desired and expected that an unsettling process should now occur in her career.  It seemed to her that in mere decency Louis might have allowed at any rate a year or two to pass before occupying himself so stringently with her eternal welfare.  She belonged to the middle class (intermediate between the industrial and the aristocratic employing) which is responsible for the Five Towns’ reputation for joylessness, the class which sticks its chin out and gets things done (however queer the things done may be), the class which keeps the district together and maintains its solidity, the class which is ashamed of nothing but idleness, frank enjoyment, and the caprice of the moment. (Its idiomatic phrase for expressing the experience of gladness, “I sang ‘O be joyful,’” alone demonstrates its unwillingness to rejoice.) She had espoused the hedonistic class (always secretly envied by the other), and Louis’ behaviour as a member of that class had already begun to disappoint her.  Was it fair of him to say in his conduct:  “The fun is over.  We must be strictly conventional now”?  His costly caprices for Llandudno and the pleasures of idleness were quite beside the point.