at the head of the street and that the buckets of house-refuse were still waiting by twos and threes at the kerb for the dust-cart. She would have been disturbed had things been otherwise. It was a satisfaction to her that everything had its time and place; that streets were paved and gardens contained within iron railings, that children were in school, infants in their perambulators, and hundreds of shopkeepers waiting behind clean counters for the thousands of housewives who like herself were shopping. The orderly life of Calderwick was keeping pace with the ordered march of the sun. She could hear the prolonged whistle of the express from King’s Cross as it pulled out of the station. Punctual to the minute.
III
At about the same time, in the same town of Calderwick, and only round the corner from the manse, young Mrs John Shand was buttoning her gloves and tilting her head to study, in the long mirror, the hang of her new coat. It had a perfect line, she decided; most women, of course, wouldn’t have the shoulders for it. Whatever Hector’s wife had on, bride or no bride, she would be put in the shade by such elegance.
Mabel Shand smiled to her own reflection, an approving smile. Her teeth were strong, white and even; her skin was naturally fresh and finely textured. She bent her knee slightly and admired the fall of her garments; most women’s thighs were too short, but she had a long and graceful curve from the hip to the knee. She felt that she was marked out for superiority, unlike the majority of the Calderwick women, botched and clumsy creatures who should be thankful for anything they could get.
Her gloves were buttoned. While she was still at school she had read in a magazine that no lady ever left the buttoning of her gloves to be done on the stairs or in the hall or, horror of horrors, outside the front door. Mabel had never forgotten that, and in her marriage she had her reward. From a farm in the village of Invercalder she had, two years ago, hooked the biggest fish in the town of Calderwick, John Shand, the head of an old-established firm of grain merchants and flour millers.
Sarah Murray, too, had been born in Invercalder, where her father was the village schoolmaster, and like Mabel had been promoted to Calderwick, so that, geographically at least, their worlds were the same. But either because the grey stone schoolhouse stood bleakly on a hill at the west end of the village and the farm lay snug in a hollow at the east end, or because a schoolmaster’s time-table is ruled by will while a farmer’s is governed by capricious seasons, life in the schoolhouse was hard, angular and rigid, whereas in the farm it was kindly and easy-going. Mabel accordingly was left to form herself, but Sarah was rigorously formed by her father, and the process had been so thorough that she had no inkling of it. From the kindling of the first fire in the morning to the blotting out of the last light before going to bed she found the whole justification of life in the fulfilment of daily routine. That routine Mabel Shand ignored, in so far as a Calderwick woman could ignore it. In the same way she ignored the orderly activities of the municipality; it gave her no thrill of satisfaction to know that her bread was regularly delivered and her dustbins emptied daily. Sarah, if she had pictured a web of the world, might have regarded herself as one of many flies caught in it by God, her sole consolation being the presence of the other flies and the impartial symmetry of the web, but Mabel lived at the heart of her own spider’s web, and every thread from the outside world led directly to herself.
Mrs John Shand came down the steps of number seven Balfour Terrace just as Sarah Murray rounded the corner. She might as well walk up with Sarah, she thought. Poor old thing, what a frump!
Sarah paused and looked round. ‘Are you going up my way, Mabel, to the High Street?’
‘Yes; to the new house, you know. Hector and his wife are coming home this morning.’
‘Oh, I’d forgotten they were coming to-day. They’ve been up Deeside, haven’t they? I’ve never seen Mrs Hector; what’s she like?’
Mabel nearly shrugged her shoulders.
‘You’ll see her in church on Sunday, I suppose. She’s considered clever.’
You won’t like that, thought Sarah, but checked the thought immediately. Even though she had known Mabel from childhood she tried to be charitable towards the wife of her brother’s leading elder.
Mabel’s face twinkled for a moment as she recalled the first occasion on which she had seen the present Mrs Hector Shand. Hector had whirled her up to the University to meet the girl, and Elizabeth had turned up for tea in a cheap, striped cotton frock and sand-shoes. Sand-shoes!
‘That’s a nice coat, Mabel.’ Sarah was trying to atone for her uncharitable thoughts. ‘New, isn’t it?’
‘First time on to-day. Latest fashion, my dear. John likes it immensely.’
‘No doubt.’
In spite of herself Sarah’s tone was blighting. It was long since she had had a new coat, and what with one thing and another, Ned’s gas and coal and keep, it would be a long time before she got one.
She always dries up when I mention John, said Mabel to herself. And John would never have looked at her in any case.
‘How’s Ned?’ she asked.
‘Not any better, I’m afraid.’ Sarah’s voice lost its edge. ‘Mabel, I simply don’t know what to do. What can we do?’
Mabel felt a vague discomfort.
‘Ned’s always very nice to me whenever I see him.’ It sounded almost like self-defence.
‘That’s just it,’ burst out Sarah. ‘He’s nice to everybody except to me and William. It doesn’t matter what we do. Yesterday it was a newspaper he said I’d deliberately hidden from him because there was a job in it he meant to apply for. He said I was always interfering with his happiness. It’s so unjust, Mabel; it’s so unreasonable: the more I think of it the more desperate I feel. I’ve tried everything; I’ve coaxed him and scolded him and ignored him, and he just gets worse and worse. I told William this morning that if—’
She stopped herself. When Ned came again to his senses it would never do for Mabel to be in a position to tell him that Sarah had even thought of sending him away.
‘You’ve known Ned all his life,’ she went on. ‘Was he ever like this when he was going to school?’
‘He was always shy.’ Mabel’s discomfort was increasing. ‘It wasn’t easy to know what he was thinking.’
‘But you used to bicycle in to school with him every day, Mabel. Surely you would have noticed if there was anything? I’ve racked my brains and racked my brains and I can’t think of an explanation. He was so brilliant at school and at the University, and he was always as quiet as a mouse when he came home. Even when he had that breakdown in his finals he wasn’t like this.’
Mable’s uneasiness was now tinged with excitement. It seemed natural to her that she should be the centre of the world to others as well as to herself, and she had always suspected that what had unsettled Ned in the beginning was her marriage to John Shand. It wasn’t her fault, was it? She had flirted a little with the boy, but then she had flirted with so many boys. A kiss or two meant nothing when one was sixteen. It wasn’t her fault. But it must have left an impression on Ned. She could wager that no other girl had ever kissed him. Half rueful and half pleased she glanced sideways at Sarah. Of course Sarah wouldn’t understand.
‘He’ll get over it,’ she announced confidently. Then on a sudden impulse
