The next morning, early, Sophia stood gazing out of the window at the Square.  It was Saturday, and all over the Square little stalls, with yellow linen roofs, were being erected for the principal market of the week.  In those barbaric days Bursley had a majestic edifice, black as basalt, for the sale of dead animals by the limb and rib—­it was entitled ’the Shambles’—­but vegetables, fruit, cheese, eggs, and pikelets were still sold under canvas.  Eggs are now offered at five farthings apiece in a palace that cost twenty-five thousand pounds.  Yet you will find people in Bursley ready to assert that things generally are not what they were, and that in particular the romance of life has gone.  But until it has gone it is never romance.  To Sophia, though she was in a mood which usually stimulates the sense of the romantic, there was nothing of romance in this picturesque tented field.  It was just the market.  Holl’s, the leading grocer’s, was already open, at the extremity of the Square, and a boy apprentice was sweeping the pavement in front of it.  The public-houses were open, several of them specializing in hot rum at 5.30 a.m.  The town-crier, in his blue coat with red facings, crossed the Square, carrying his big bell by the tongue.  There was the same shocking hole in one of Mrs. Povey’s (confectioner’s) window-curtains—­a hole which even her recent travail could scarcely excuse.  Such matters it was that Sophia noticed with dull, smarting eyes.

“Sophia, you’ll take your death of cold standing there like that!”

She jumped.  The voice was her mother’s.  That vigorous woman, after a calm night by the side of the paralytic, was already up and neatly dressed.  She carried a bottle and an egg-cup, and a small quantity of jam in a table-spoon.

“Get into bed again, do!  There’s a dear!  You’re shivering.”

White Sophia obeyed.  It was true; she was shivering.  Constance awoke.  Mrs. Baines went to the dressing-table and filled the egg-cup out of the bottle.

“Who’s that for, mother?” Constance asked sleepily.

“It’s for Sophia,” said Mrs. Baines, with good cheer.  “Now, Sophia!” and she advanced with the egg-cup in one hand and the table-spoon in the other.

“What is it, mother?” asked Sophia, who well knew what it was.

“Castor-oil, my dear,” said Mrs. Baines, winningly.

The ludicrousness of attempting to cure obstinacy and yearnings for a freer life by means of castor-oil is perhaps less real than apparent.  The strange interdependence of spirit and body, though only understood intelligently in these intelligent days, was guessed at by sensible mediaeval mothers.  And certainly, at the period when Mrs. Baines represented modernity, castor-oil was still the remedy of remedies.  It had supplanted cupping.  And, if part of its vogue was due to its extreme unpleasantness, it had at least proved its qualities in many a contest with disease.  Less than two years previously old Dr. Harrop (father of him who told Mrs. Baines about Mrs. Povey), being then aged eighty-six, had fallen from top to bottom of his staircase.  He had scrambled up, taken a dose of castor-oil at once, and on the morrow was as well as if he had never seen a staircase.  This episode was town property and had sunk deep into all hearts.