The Lost Girl

l-established society. The old "County" has fled from the sight of so much disembowelled coal, to flourish on mineral rights in regions still idyllic. Remains one gr

ume of the chemist and the disinfectant of the doctor, on to the serene gold-tarnish of bank-managers, cashiers for the firm, clergymen and such-like, as far as the automobile refulgence of the general-manager o

diversified by elementary schoolmasters and nonconformist clergy; a higher layer of bank-managers, rich millers and well-to-do ironm

the Midlands of England, in this year of grace 1920. But let us g

unmarriageable women, called old maids? Why is it that every tradesman, every school-master, every bank-manager, and every clergyman produces one, two, three or more old maids? Do the middle-classes, particularly the lower middle-

is a tragedy. Or

ant-industrial society, of which we hear so much. Perhaps all they lack is an occupation

of one of these daughters of comfort and woe getting off. They flocked to the well-to-do weddings with an intoxication of relief. For let class-jealousy be what it may, a woman hates to see

only one child: his d

a Hou

ouse. He was a tall, thin, elegant young man with side-whiskers, genuinely refined, somewhat in the Bulwer style. He had a taste for elegant conversation and elegant literature and elegant Christianity: a tall, thin, brittle young man, rather fluttering in his manner, full of facile ideas, and with a beautiful speaking voice: most beautiful. Withal, of course, a tradesman. He courted a small, dark woman, older than himself, daughter of a Derbyshire squire. He expecte

vast, that is, for Woodhouse-standing on the main street and high-road of the small but growing town. The lower front co

scious in texture and of unforeseen exquisiteness: he dreamed of carriages of the "County" arrested before his windows, of exquisite women ruffling charmed, entranced to his counter. And charming, entrancing, he served them his lovely fabrics, which only he and they could suf

e to her new home, his window on the Manchester side was a foam and a may-blossom of muslins and prints, his window on the London side was an autumn evening of silks and rich fabrics. What w

the monstrous matrimonial bed: it could only be mounted by means of a stool and chair. But the poor, secluded little woman, older than he, must have climbed up with a heavy heart, to lie and face the gloomy Bastille

e other end of the house, where he slept on a rough board and played the anchorite for the rest of his days. His wife w

ent and enthusiasm bore them away. They submitted to him. The shop attracted much curiosity. But the poor-spirited Woodhouse people were weak buyers. They wearied James Houghton with their demand for common zephyrs, for red flannel whic

to the face of James Houghton. At first, of course, he merely marked down, with discretion, his less-expensive stock of prints and muslins, nuns

ed in Woodhouse, and were dumped on the pavement of the shop. Friday evening came, and with it a revelation in Houghton's window: the first piqués, the first strangely-woven and honey-combed toilet covers a

e background, while tippets, boas, muffs and winter-fancies coquetted in front of the window-space. Friday-night crowds gathered outside: the gas-lamps shone their brightest: James Houghton hovered in the background like an author on his first night in the theatre. The result was a sensation. Ten villages stared and crushed round the plate glass. It was a sensation: but what sensation! In the breasts

house, as a very condition of its own being, hated any approach to originality or real taste, this James Houghton could never learn. He thought he had not been clever enough, when he had been far, far too clever already. He always thought that Dame Fortune was a capricious and fastidious dame, a sort of Elizabeth of Austria or Alexandra, Princess of Wales, elegant beyond his grasp. Whereas Dame Fortune, even in London or Vienna, let alone in Woodhouse, was a vulgar woman of the middle and lower middle-c

, he let go splendidly. He marked down his prints, his chintzes, his dimities and his veilings with a grand and lavish hand. Bang went his blue pencil through 3/11, and nobly he subsc

, no matter what the pattern. And so the little Woodhouse girls went to school in petties and drawers made of material which James had destined for fair summer dresses: petties and drawers of which the little W

m, and pointing him to wealth untold. True, he became also Superintendent of the Sunday School. But whether this was

Houghton, small, pale and withheld, taking a walk with her dainty little girl, so fresh in an ermine tippet and a muff. Mrs. Houghton in shiny black

h pence and entreaty, leaving them dumfounded, whilst she leaned blue at the lips against a wall. If she saw a carter crack his whip

Miss Frost was a handsome, vigorous young woman of about thirty years of age, with grey-white

ness, his lack of human feeling, and most of all, his fairy fantasy. As James went further into life, he became a dreamer. Sad indeed that he died before the days of Freud. He enjoyed the most wonderful and fairy-like dreams, which he could describe perfectly, in charming, delicate language. At such times his beautifully modulated voice all but sang, his grey eyes gleamed fiercely under his bushy, hairy eyebrows, his pale face with its side-whiskers had a strange lue

"Indeed, indeed! Oh, indeed! Well, well, I'm sorry you find it so-" as if the injury consisted in her finding it so. Then he would flit away to the Conservative Club, with

the reins of the domestic government. Her rule was quiet, strong, and generous. She was not seeking her own way. She was steering the poor domestic ship of Manchester House, illuminating its dark rooms with her own sure, radiant presence: her silver-white hair, and her pale, heavy, reposeful face seemed to give off a certain radiance. She seemed to give weight, ballast, and repose to the staggering and bewildered home. She controlled the maid, and suggested the meals-meals which James at

ons, as if the whole thing had just been a sensational-?sthetic attribute to himself. Not a grain of human fee

n-and-six. He nearly kissed the gipsy woman with a basket of tin saucepan-lids, when at last she bought it for five shillings, at the end of one of his winter sales. But even she, in spite of the bitter sleety day, would not put the coat on in the shop. She carried it over her arm down to the Miners' Arms. And later, with a shock that really hurt him, James, peeping bird-like out of his shop door, saw

s Frost's sweeping together all the big girls, under her surveillance, and by her organizing that the tall and handsome blacksmith who taught the lower boys should extend his influence over the upper boys. His influence was more than effectual. It consisted in gripping any recalcitrant boy just above the knee, and jesting with him in a jocular manner, in the dialect. The blacksmith's hand was all a blacksmith's hand need be, and his dialect was as broad as could be wished. Between the grip and the homely idiom no boy could endure without squealing.

adows at the back the invalid heard the hammering and sawing, and suffered. W. H. Johnson came out with a spick-and-span window, and had his wife, a shrewd, quiet woman, and his daughter, a handsome, loud girl, to help him on Friday evenings. Men flocked in-even women, buying their husbands a sixpence-halfpenny tie. They could have

to Swedenborg, had not his clipt wings spread for a new flight. He hit upon the brilliant idea of working up his derelict f

every vibration. She could never get over her nervous apprehension of an invasion. Every morning alike, she felt an invasion of some enemy was breaking in on her. And all day long the low, steady rumble of sewing-machines overhead seemed like the low drumming of a bombardment upon her weak heart. To make matters worse, James Houghton decided that he must have his sewing-machines driven by some extra-human force. He installed another plant of machinery-acetylene or some such contrivanc

were the mode. Perhaps it was Alexandra, Princess of Wales, who gave glory to the slim, glove-fitting Princess Robe. Be that as it may, James Houghton designed robes. His work-girls, a race even more callous than shop-girls, pro

ble item in Manchester House, as things went. And so she trudged the country, giving music lessons to the daughters of tradesmen and of colliers who boasted pianofortes. She even taught heavy-handed but dauntless colliers, who were seized with a passion to "play." Miles she trudge

g her name "Miss Frost!" giving it the proper intonation of salute, were fussy men indeed. "She's a lady if ever there was one," they said. And they meant it. Hearing her name, poor Miss Frost would flash a smile and a nod from behind her spectacles, but whose black face she smiled to she never, or rarely knew

ey she made went chiefly to support the Houghton household. In the meanwhile she drilled Alvina thoroughly in theory and pianoforte practice, for Alvina was naturally musical,

he work-girls, Miss Pinnegar. James Houghton complained of Fortune, yet to what other man would Fortune have sent two such wo

nervous invalid, Clariss Houghton: for more than twenty years she cherished, tended and protected the young Alvina, shielding the child alike from a neurotic mother and a father such as James. For nearly t

an with a high colour in her cheeks, and dun, close hair like a cap. It was evident she was not a lady: her grammar was not without reproach. She had pale grey

ice was clear and straight as a bell-note, open as the day. Yet Alvina, though in loyalty she adhered to her beloved Miss Frost, did not really mind the quiet suggestive power of Miss Pinnegar. For Miss Pinnegar was not vulgarly insinuating. On the contrary, the things she said were rather clumsy and downright. It was only that she seemed to weigh what she said, secretly, before she said it,

n immediacy of correspondence between the two, and an unquestioned priority in their unison, his and hers, which was a cruel thorn in Miss Frost's outspoken breast. This sort of secret intimacy and secret exulting in having, really, the chief power, was most repugnant to the white-haired woman. Not that there was, in fact, any secrecy

o her beloved Miss Frost, and then these two strange women. Miss Pinnegar never lifted up her voice in household affairs: she seemed, by her silence, to admit her own inadequacy in culture and intellect, when topics of interest were being discussed, only coming out now and then with

n excited and usually hilarious ten minutes on the pavement under the window. Muffled shrieks of young damsels who had just got their first view, guffaws of sympathetic youths, continued giggling and expostulation and "Eh, but what price the umbrella skirt, my girl!" and "You'd like to marry me in that, my boy-what? not half!"-or else "Eh, now, if you'd seen me in that you'd ha

times when the shrieks grew loudest she came to the shop door and looked with her pale grey eyes at the ridicu

iers' wives, good print dresses for servants, and so on. She executed no flights of fancy. She had her goods made to suit her people. And so, underneath the foam and froth of James' creative adventure flowed a slow but steady stream of output and income. The women of Woodhouse came at last

saw the travellers and ordered the unions and calicoes and grey flannel. James hovered round and said the last word, of

oon. In the evening there was a crush. A good moiré underskirt for one-and-eleven-three was not to be neglected, and a handsome string-lace collarette for six-three would iron out and be worth at least three-and-six. That was how it went: it would nearly all of it iron out into something really nice, poor James' crumpled stock. His fine, semi-transparent face flushed pink, his eyes flashed as he took in the sixpences and handed back knots

became very tired those evenings-her hair under its invisible hairnet became flatter, her cheeks hung down purplish and mottled. But while James stood she stood. The peo

ived payments for her own productions. Some of her regular customers paid her a shilling a week-or less. But it made a sm

flight. He decided it was better to be a manufacturer than a tradesman. His shop, already only half its original size, wa

said the architect, take off one good-sized shop, rather than halve the premises. James would be left

and florid type. The new grocer whistled "Just Like the Ivy," and shouted boisterously to his shop-boy. In his doorway, protruding on James' sensitive vision, was a pyramid of sixpence-halfpenny tins of salmon, red, shiny tins with pink halve

pt her own work-rooms against him, with a soft, heavy, silent tenacity that would have beaten stronger men than James. But his strength lay in his pliability. He rummaged in the emp

to disillusionment, he almost welcomed it. Within six months he realized that every inch of elastic cost him exactly sixty per cent.

p and made into as-yet-unheard-of garments. Miss Pinnegar kept her thumb on this en

de-whiskers, so that they only grew becomingly as low as his ears. His rather large, grey moustache was brushed off his mouth. His hair, gone very thin, was brushed frail and floating over his baldness. But still a gentleman, still courteous, with a charming voice he suggested the possibilities of a pad of green parrots' tail-feathers, or of a few yards of pink-pearl trimming or of old chenille fringe. The women would pinch the thick, exquisite old chenille fringe, delicate and faded, curious to feel its softness. But they wouldn't give threepence for it. Tapes, ribb

orders for shirts, discussed and agreed,

by fate, to the Conservative Club, and twice a day he was seen as hastily returning, to his meals. He was becoming an old man: his daughter was a young woman: but in his

dyke. Big penny-daisies grew in tufts on the brink of the yellow clay at Klondyke, yellow eggs-and-bacon spread their midsummer mats of flower. James came home with clay smeared all over him, discoursing brilliantly on

He was all the more sure, because other men of the town were in with him at this

ed, he was about square. And yet he felt Klondyke as the greatest blow of all. Miss Pinnegar would have aided and abetted him in another scheme, if it would but have cheered him. E

ntiful seam of drossy, yellowish coal behind the Methodist New Connection Chapel. The seam was opened in the side of a bank, and approached by a footrill, a sloping shaft down which the men walked. When the strik

it. He gathered two miner partners-he trotted endlessly up to the field, he talked, as he had nev

e affair was ricketty, amateurish, and twopenny. The name Connection Meadow was forgotten within three months. Everybody knew the place as Throttle-Ha'penny. "What!" said a collier to his

ut a black band on his Sunday silk hat. But he was too feverishly busy at Throttle-Ha'penny, se

by old coal-carts rambled up behind the New Connection, and filled from the pit-bank. The coal improved a little in quality: it was cheap and it was handy.

than a year. A year

became ill and sudd

mbled. But it was Thro

ed in all his limbs, a

g noble provision fo

the roof of Throttle-Ha'penny was so loose and soft, James could not afford timber to hold it up. In short, when his daughter Alvina was about twenty-seven ye

t Miss Pinnegar persuaded him to take the shop again on Friday evening.