Vera repeated. "I know it's novelty. I'm always right, aren't I, Stephen?" She looked round. "Ask Stephen."
"You were right last week but one, my child," said Stephen.
"And did you make anything?" Clara demanded eagerly.
"Only fifteen shillings," said Vera discontentedly. "But if Stephen had listened to me we should have made lots."
Albert Benbow's interest in the word was strengthened.
Fearns, leaning carefully back in his chair, asked with fine indifference: "By the way, what is this week's word, Tom? I haven't your secret sources of information. I have to wait for the paper."
"'Unaccountably,'" said Tom. "Had you anything on it?"
"No," Fearns admitted. "I've caught a cold this week, it seems."
Albert Benbow stared at him. Here was another competitor-and as acute a man of business as you would find in the Five Towns!
"Me, too!" said Edwin, smiling like a culprit.
Hilda sprang up gleefully, and pointed at him a finger of delicious censure.
"Oh! You wicked sinner! You never told me you'd gone in! You deceitful old thing!"
"Well, it was a man at the shop who would have me try," Edwin boyishly excused himself.
Hilda's vivacity enchanted Edwin. The charm of her reproof was simply exquisite in its good-nature and in the elegance of its gesture. The lingering taste of the feverish kiss she had given him a few minutes earlier bemused him and he flushed. To conceal his inconvenient happiness in the thought of his wife he turned to open the new enlarged window that gave on the garden. (He had done away with the old garden-entrance of the house, and thrown the side corridor into the drawing-room.) Then he moved towards Janet Orgreave, who was still seated at the closed piano.
"Your father isn't coming, I suppose?" he asked her.
The angelic spinster, stylishly dressed in white, and wearing as usual her kind heart on her sleeve, smiled with soft benignity, and shook her head.
"He told me to tell you he was too old. He is, you know."
"And how's your mother?"
"Oh, pretty well, considering… I really ought not to leave them."
"Oh, yes!" Edwin protested. The momentary vision of Mr. and Mrs. Orgreave in the large house close by, now practically deserted by all their children except Janet, saddened him.
Then a loud voice dominated the general conversation behind him:
"I say, this is a bit stiff. I did think I should be free of it here. But no! Same old missing-word everywhere! What is it this week, Swetnam?"
It was Johnnie Orgreave, appreciably younger than his sister, but a full-grown man of the world, and somewhat dandiacal. After shaking hands with Hilda he came straight to Edwin.
"Awfully sorry I'm so late, old chap. How do, Jan?"
"Of course you are," Edwin quizzed him like an uncle.
"Where's Ingpen?"
"Not come."
"Not come! He said he should be here at eight. Just like him!" said Johnnie. "I expect he's had a puncture."
"I've been looking out for him every minute," Edwin muttered.
In the middle of the room Albert Benbow, stocky and vulgar, but feeling himself more and more a man of the world among men and women of the world, was proclaiming, not without excitement:
"Well, I agree with Mrs. Cheswardine. 'Novelty' 's much more likely than 'interest.' 'Interest' 's the wrong kind of word altogether. It doesn't agree with the beginning of the paragraph."
"That's right, Mr. Benbow," Vera encouraged him with flirtatious dimples. "You put your money on me, even if my own husband won't." Albert as a dowdy dissenter was quite out of her expensive sphere, but to Vera any man was a man.
"Now, Albert," Clara warned him, "if you win anything, you must give it to me for the new perambulator."
("Dash that girl's infernal domesticity!" thought Edwin savagely.)
"Who says I'm going in for it, missis?" Albert challenged.
"I only say if you do, dear," Clara said smoothly.
"Then I will!" Albert announced the great decision. "Just for the fun of the thing, I will. Thank ye, Mrs. Cheswardine."
He glanced at Mrs. Cheswardine as a knight at his unattainable mistress. Indeed the decision had in it something of the chivalrous; the attention of slim provocative Vera, costliest and most fashionably dressed woman in Bursley, had stirred his fancy to wander far beyond its usual limits.
"Albert! Well, I never!" exclaimed Mrs. Hamps.
"You don't mind, do you Auntie?" said Albert jovially, standing over her.
"Not if it's not gambling," said Mrs. Hamps stoutly. "And I hope it isn't. And it would be very nice for Clara, I'm sure, if you won."
"Hurrah for Mrs. Hamps!" Johnnie Orgreave almost yelled.
At the same moment, Janet Orgreave, swinging round on the music-stool, lifted the lid of the piano, and, still with her soft, angelic smile, played loudly and dashingly the barbaric, Bacchic, orgiastic melody which had just recently inflamed England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and the Five Towns-the air which was unlike anything ever heard before by British ears, and which meant nothing whatever that could be avowed, the air which heralded social revolutions and inaugurated a new epoch. And as the ringed fingers of the quiet, fading spinster struck out the shocking melody, Vera Cheswardine and one or two others who had been to London and there seen the great legendary figure, Lottie Collins, hummed more or less brazenly the syllables heavy with mysterious significance:
"Tarara-boom-deay!
Tarara-boom-deay!
Tarara-boom-deay!
Tarara-boom-deay!"
Upon this entered Mr. Peartree, like a figure of retribution, and silence fell.
"I'm afraid…" he began. "Mr. Benbow."
They spoke together.
A scared servant-girl had come up from the Benbow home with the affrighting news that Bert Benbow, who had gone to bed with the other children as usual, was not in his bed and could not be discovered in the house. Mr. Peartree, being in the hall, had chosen himself to bear the grievous tidings to the drawing-room. In an instant Albert and Clara were parents again. Both had an idea that the unprecedented, incomprehensible calamity was a heavenly dispensation to punish them for having trifled with the missing-word. Their sudden seriousness was terrific. They departed immediately, without ceremony of any sort. Mrs. Hamps said that she really ought to go too, and Maggie said that as Auntie Hamps was going she also would go. The parson said that he had already stayed longer than he ought, in view of another engagement, and he followed. Edwin and Hilda dutifully saw them off and were as serious as the circumstances demanded. But those who remained in the drawing-room sniggered, and when Hilda rejoined them she laughed. The house felt lighter. Edwin, remaining longest at the door, saw
