“So I do. But I’d finished my book.”
“What is this?” Mrs. Baines picked up the volume, which was covered with black oil-cloth.
She picked it up with a hostile air. For her attitude towards the Free Library was obscurely inimical. She never read anything herself except The Sunday at Home, and Constance never read anything except The Sunday at Home. There were scriptural commentaries, Dugdale’s Gazetteer, Culpepper’s Herbal, and works by Bunyan and Flavius Josephus in the drawing-room bookcase; also Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And Mrs. Baines, in considering the welfare of her daughters, looked askance at the whole remainder of printed literature. If the Free Library had not formed part of the Famous Wedgwood Institution, which had been opened with immense eclat by the semi-divine Gladstone; if the first book had not been ceremoniously ‘taken out’ of the Free Library by the Chief Bailiff in person—a grandfather of stainless renown—Mrs. Baines would probably have risked her authority in forbidding the Free Library.
“You needn’t be afraid,” said Sophia, laughing. “It’s Miss Sewell’s Experience of Life.”
“A novel, I see,” observed Mrs. Baines, dropping the book.
Gold and jewels would probably not tempt a Sophia of these days to read Experience of Life; but to Sophia Baines the bland story had the piquancy of the disapproved.
The next day Mrs. Baines summoned Sophia into her bedroom.
“Sophia,” said she, trembling, “I shall be glad if you will not walk about the streets with young men until you have my permission.”
The girl blushed violently. “I—I—”
“You were seen in Wedgwood Street,” said Mrs. Baines.