"I'd no idea there was a theatre in Bursley," she remarked idly, driven into a banality by the press of her sensations.
"They used to call it the Blood Tub," he replied. "Melodrama and murder and gore--you know."
She exclaimed in horror. "Why are people like that in the Five Towns?"
"It's our form of poetry, I suppose," said he.
She started, sensitively. It seemed to her that she had never understood the secret inner spirit of the Five Towns, and that by a single phrase he had made her understand it.... 'Our form of poetry'! Who but he could have said a thing at once so illuminating and so simple?
Apparently perplexed by the obvious effect on her of his remark, he said:
"But you belong to the Five Towns, don't you?"
She answered quietly that she did. But her heart was saying: "I do now. You have initiated me. I never felt the Five Towns before. You have made me feel them."
II
At the station the head porter received their inquiry for a Bradshaw with a dull stare and a shake of the head. No such thing had ever been asked for at Bursley Station before, and the man's imagination could not go beyond the soiled time-tables loosely pinned and pasted up on the walls of the booking-office. Hilda suggested that the ticket-clerk should be interrogated, but the aperture of communication with him was shut. She saw Edwin Clayhanger brace himself and rap on the wood; and instead of deploring his diffidence she liked it and found it full of charm. The partition clicked aside, and the ticket-clerk's peering, suspicious head showed in its place, mutely demanding a reason for this extraordinary disturbance of the dream in which the station slumbered between two half-hourly trains. With a characteristic peculiar slanting motion Edwin nodded.