theory every purse was inexhaustible.  At any rate, it was impossible to conceive a purse empty.  The system wore the face of the ideal.  Manners were proper to the utmost degree; they neatly marked the equality of the shoppers and the profound difference between the shoppers and the shopkeepers.  All ladies were agreeable, all babies in perambulators were darlings.  The homes thus represented by ladies and babies were clearly polite homes, where reigned suavity, tranquillity, affection, and plenty.  Civilization was justified in Wedgwood Street and the market-place—­and also, to some extent, in St. Luke’s Square....  And Rachel was one of these ladies.  Her gloved hand closed over a purse exactly in the style of the others.  And her purse, regard being had to the inheritance of her husband, was supposed to hide vast sums; so much so that ladies who had descended from distant heights in pony-carts gazed upon her with the respect due to a rival.  All welcomed her into the exclusive, correct little world—­not only the shopkeepers but the buyers therein.  She represented youthful love.  Her life must be, and was, an idyll!  True, she had no perambulator, but middle-aged ladies greeted her with wistfulness in their voices and in their eyes.

She smiled often as she told and retold the story of Louis’ accident, and gave positive assurances that he was in no danger, and would not bear a scar.  She blushed often.  She was shyly happy in her unhappiness.  The experience alternated between the unreal and the real.  The extraordinary complexity of life was beginning to put its spell on her.  She could not determine the relative values of the various facets of the experience.

When she had done the important parts of her business, she thought she would go into the covered market, which, having one entrance in the market-place and another in Wedgwood Street, connects the two thoroughfares.  She had never been into the covered market because Mrs. Maldon had a prejudice against its wares.  She went out of mere curiosity, just to enlarge her knowledge of her adopted town.  The huge interior, with its glazed roof, was full of clatter, shouting, and the smell of innumerable varieties of cheese.  She passed a second-hand bookstall without seeing it, and then discerned admirable potatoes at three-halfpence a peck less than she had been paying—­and Mrs. Maldon was once more set down as an old lady with peculiarities.  However, by the time Rachel had made a critical round of the entire place, with its birds in cages, popular songs at a penny, sweetstuffs, cheap cottons and woollens, bright tinware, colonial fleshmeat, sausage displays, and particularly its cheeses, Mrs. Maldon was already recovering her reputation as a woman whose death was an irreparable loss to the town.