chins; but it is the fine upward curve of the nostrils and the fall of
the eyelids which most surely mark them. Their glances and their faint
smiles are beneficent, yet with a subtle shade of half-malicious
superiority. When they look at you from under those apparently fatigued
eyelids, you feel that they have an inward and concealed existence far
beyond the ordinary--that they are aware of many things which you can
never know. It is as though their souls, during former incarnations, had
trafficked with the secret forces of nature, and so acquired a
mysterious and nameless quality above all the transient attributes of
beauty, wit, and talent. They exist: that is enough; that is their
genius. Whether they control, or are at the mercy of, those secret
forces; whether they have in fact learnt, but may not speak, the true
answer to the eternal Why; whether they are not perhaps a riddle even to
their own simple selves: these are points which can never be decided.

Everyone who knew Mary Beechinor, in her cousin's home, or at chapel, or
on Titus Price's earthenware manufactory, where she worked, said or
thought that 'there was something about her ...' and left the phrase
unachieved. She was twenty-five, and she had lived under the same roof
with Edward Beechinor for seven years, since the sudden death of her
parents. The arrangement then made was that Edward should keep her,
while she conducted his household. She had insisted on permission to
follow her own occupation, and in order that she might be at liberty to
do so she personally paid eighteenpence a week to a little girl who came
in to perform sundry necessary duties every day at noon. Mary Beechinor
was a paintress by trade. As a class the paintresses of the Five Towns
are somewhat similar to the more famous mill-girls of Lancashire and
Yorkshire--fiercely independent by reason of good wages earned, loving
finery and brilliant colours, loud-tongued and aggressive, perhaps, and
for the rest neither more nor less kindly, passionate, faithful, than