dazzle of the silver-plated harness, the fine lines of the cart, the
unbending mien of the driver, made a glittering cynosure for envy. All
around was grime, squalor, servitude, ugliness; the inglorious travail
of two hundred thousand people, above ground and below it, filled the
day and the night. But here, as it were suddenly, out of that earthy and
laborious bed, rose the blossom of luxury, grace, and leisure, the final
elegance of the industrial district of the Five Towns. The contrast
between Leonora and the rough creatures in the archway, between the
flower and the phosphates which nourished it, was sharp and decisive:
and Leonora, in the September sunshine, was well aware of the contrast.
She felt that the loud-voiced girls were at one extremity of the scale
and she at the other; and this arrangement seemed natural, necessary,
inevitable.

She was a beautiful woman. She had a slim perfect figure; quite simply
she carried her head so high and her shoulders so square that her back
seemed to be hollowed out, and no tightness on the part of a bodice
could hide this charming concavity. Her face was handsome with its large
regular features; one noticed the abundant black hair under the hat, the
thick eyebrows, the brown and opaque skin, the teeth impeccably white,
and the firm, unyielding mouth and chin. Underneath the chin, half
muffling it, came a white muslin bow, soft, frail, feminate, an
enchanting disclaimer of that facial sternness and the masculinity of
that tailor-made dress, a signal at once provocative and wistful of the
woman. She had brains; they appeared in her keen dark eyes. Her judgment
was experienced and mature. She knew her world and its men and women.
She was not too soon shocked, not too severe in her verdicts, not the
victim of too many illusions. And yet, though everything about her
witnessed to a serene temperament and the continual appeasing of mild
desires, she dreamed sadly, like the girls in the archway, of an