Anna of the Five Towns | Page 3

easy inflections of a man well accustomed to prominence in the society
of women. Little Agnes seized Anna's left arm, silently holding up the
prize, and Anna nodded appreciation.
'Yes,' she said as they walked across the yard, 'one of my girls has been
doing wrong. She stole a Bible from another girl, so of course I had to
mention it to the superintendent. Mr. Price gave her a long lecture, and

now she is waiting upstairs till he is ready to go with her to her home
and talk to her parents. He says she must be dismissed.'
'Dismissed!'
Anna's look flashed a grateful response to him. By the least possible
emphasis he had expressed a complete disagreement with his senior
colleague which etiquette forbade him to utter in words.
'I think it's a very great pity,' Anna said firmly. 'I rather like the girl,'
she ventured in haste; 'you might speak to Mr. Price about it.'
'If he mentions it to me.'
'Yes, I meant that. Mr. Price said--if it had been anything else but a
Bible--'
'Um!' he murmured very low, but she caught the significance of his
intonation. They did not glance at each other: it was unnecessary. Anna
felt that comfortable easement of the spirit which springs from the
recognition of another spirit capable of understanding without
explanations and of sympathising without a phrase. Under that calm
mask a strange and sweet satisfaction thrilled through her as her
precious instinct of common sense--rarest of good qualities, and pining
always for fellowship-- found a companion in his own. She had
dreaded the overtures which for a fortnight past she had foreseen were
inevitably to come from Mynors: he was a stranger, whom she merely
respected. Now in a sudden disclosure she knew him and liked him.
The dire apprehension of those formal 'advances' which she had
watched other men make to other women faded away. It was at once a
release and a reassurance.
They were passing through the gate, Agnes skipping round her sister's
skirts, when Willie Price reappeared from the direction of the chapel.
'Forgotten something?' Mynors inquired of him blandly.
'Ye-es,' he stammered, clumsily raising his hat to Anna. She thought of

him exactly as Agnes had done. He hesitated for a fraction of time, and
then went up the yard towards the lecture-hall.
'Agnes has been showing me her prize,' said Mynors, as the three stood
together outside the gate. 'I ask her if she thinks she really deserves it,
and she says she does. What do you think, Miss Big Sister?
Anna gave the little girl an affectionate smile of comprehension. 'What
is it called, dear?'
'"Janey's Sacrifice or the Spool of Cotton, and other stories for
children,"' Agnes read out in a monotone: then she clutched Anna's
elbow and aimed a whisper at her ear.
'Very well, dear,' Anna answered loud, 'but we must be back by a
quarter-past four.' And turning to Mynors: 'Agnes wants to go up to the
Park to hear the band play.'
'I'm going up there, too,' he said. 'Come along, Agnes, take my arm and
show me the way.' Shyly Agnes left her sister's side and put a pink
finger into Mynors' hand.
Moor Road, which climbs over the ridge to the mining village of
Moorthorne and passes the new Park on its way, was crowded with
people going up to criticise and enjoy this latest outcome of municipal
enterprise in Bursley: sedate elders of the borough who smiled grimly
to see one another on Sunday afternoon in that undignified, idly curious
throng; white-skinned potters, and miners with the swarthy pallor of
subterranean toil; untidy Sabbath loafers whom neither church nor
chapel could entice, and the primly-clad respectable who had not only
clothes but a separate deportment for the seventh day; house-wives
whose pale faces, as of prisoners free only for a while, showed a naive
and timorous pleasure in the unusual diversion; young women made
glorious by richly-coloured stuffs and carrying themselves with the
defiant independence of good wages earned in warehouse or
painting-shop; youths oppressed by stiff new clothes bought at
Whitsuntide, in which the bright necktie and the nosegay revealed a
thousand secret aspirations; young children running and yelling with

the marvellous energy of their years; here and there a small
well-dressed group whose studious repudiation of the crowd betrayed a
conscious eminence of rank; louts, drunkards, idiots, beggars, waifs,
outcasts, and every oddity of the town: all were more or less under the
influence of a new excitement, and all with the same face of pleased
expectancy looked towards the spot where, half-way up the hill, a
denser mass of sightseers indicated the grand entrance to the Park.
'What stacks of folks!' Agnes exclaimed. 'It's like going to a football
match.'
'Do you