won sympathy. And, after all, Ellis was not such a duffer as all that at
the works. John knew other people's sons who were worse. And Ellis could
keep order in the paintresses' 'shops' as order had never been kept
there before.

John sometimes wondered what old Jack would have said about Ellis and
his friends, those handsome dogs, those fine dandies, who taught to the
Five Towns the virtue of grace and of style and of dash, who went up to
London--some of them even went to Paris--and brought back civilization
to the Five Towns, who removed from the Five Towns the reproach of being
uncouth and behind the times. Was the outcome of two generations of
unremitting toil merely Ellis? (Ellis had several pretty sisters, but
they did not count.) John could only guess at what old Jack's attitude
might have been towards Ellis--Ellis, who had his shirts made to
measure. He knew exactly what was Ellis's attitude towards the ideals of
old Jack, old Jack the class-leader, who wore clogs till he was thirty,
and dined in his shirt-sleeves at one o'clock to the end of his life.

Ellis quitted the portico, ran down the winding garden-path, and jumped
neatly and fearlessly on to an electric tramcar as it passed at the rate
of fifteen miles an hour. The car was going to Hanbridge, and it was
crowded with the joy of life; Ellis had to stand on the step. This was
the Saturday before the first Monday in August, and therefore the formal
opening of Knype Wakes, the most carnivalesque of all the carnivals
which enliven the four seasons in the Five Towns. It is still called
Knype Wakes, because once Knype overshadowed Hanbridge in importance;
but its headquarters are now quite properly at Hanbridge, the hub, the
centre, the Paris of the Five Towns--Hanbridge, the county borough of
sixty odd thousand inhabitants. It is the festival of the masses that
old Jack sprang from, and every genteel person who can leaves the Five