The girls could only press their noses against the window by
kneeling on the counter, and this they were doing. Constance's
nose was snub, but agreeably so. Sophia had a fine Roman nose; she
was a beautiful creature, beautiful and handsome at the same time.
They were both of them rather like racehorses, quivering with
delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; exquisite, enchanting
proof of the circulation of the blood; innocent, artful, roguish,
prim, gushing, ignorant, and miraculously wise. Their ages were
sixteen and fifteen; it is an epoch when, if one is frank, one
must admit that one has nothing to learn: one has learnt simply
everything in the previous six months.

"There she goes!" exclaimed Sophia.

Up the Square, from the corner of King Street, passed a woman in a
new bonnet with pink strings, and a new blue dress that sloped at
the shoulders and grew to a vast circumference at the hem. Through
the silent sunlit solitude of the Square (for it was Thursday
afternoon, and all the shops shut except the confectioner's and
one chemist's) this bonnet and this dress floated northwards in
search of romance, under the relentless eyes of Constance and
Sophia. Within them, somewhere, was the soul of Maggie, domestic
servant at Baines's. Maggie had been at the shop since before the
creation of Constance and Sophia. She lived seventeen hours of
each day in an underground kitchen and larder, and the other seven
in an attic, never going out except to chapel on Sunday evenings,
and once a month on Thursday afternoons. "Followers" were most
strictly forbidden to her; but on rare occasions an aunt from
Longshaw was permitted as a tremendous favour to see her in the