And then Hilda embraced him with not less pleasure, for the contact of his delicate flesh, and his flushed timid smile, were exquisite. She wished for a moment that George was only two and a half again, and that she could bathe him, and wipe him, and nurse him close. Clara's pride, though the visitors almost forgot to shake hands with her, was ecstatic. At length Rupert was safely on the step once more. He had made no remark whatever. Shyness prevented him from showing off his new marvellous gift, but his mother, gazing at him, said that in ordinary life he never stopped chattering.
"Come this way, will you?" said Clara effusively, and yet conspiratorially, pointing to the drawing-room, which was to the left of the front-door. From the dining-room, which was to the right of the front-door, issued confused sounds. "Albert's here. I'm so glad you've come," she added to Hilda.
Auntie Hamps murmured warningly into Hilda's ear:
"It's Bert's birthday party."
A fortnight earlier Hilda had heard rumours of Bert's approaching birthday--his twelfth, and therefore a high solemnity--but she had very wrongly forgotten about it. "I'm so glad you've come," Clara repeated in the drawing-room. "I was afraid you might be hurt. I thought I'd just bring you in here first and explain it all to you."
"Oh! Bless me!" exclaimed Auntie Hamps,--interrupting, as she glanced round the drawing-room. "We are grand! Well I never! We are grand!"
"Do you like it?" said Clara, blushing.
Auntie Hamps in reply told one of the major lies of her career. She said with rapture that she did like the new drawing-room suite. This suite was a proof, disagreeable to Auntie Hamps, that the world would never stand still. It quite ignored all the old Victorian ideals of furniture; and in ignoring the past, it also ignored the future. Victorian furniture had always sought after immortality; in Bursley there were thousands of Victorian chairs and tables that defied time and that nothing but an axe or a conflagration could destroy. But this new suite thought not of the morrow; it did not even pretend to think of the morrow. Nobody believed that it would last, and the owners of it simply forbore to reflect upon what it would be after a few years of family use. They contemplated with joy its first state of dainty freshness, and were content therein. Whereas the old Victorians lived in the future (in so far as they truly lived at all), the neo-Victorians lived careless in the present.
The suite was of apparent rosewood, with salmon-tinted upholstery ending in pleats and bows. But white also entered considerably into the scheme, for enamel paint had just reached Bursley and was destined to become the rage. Among the items of the suite was a three-legged milking-stool in deal covered with white enamel paint heightened by salmon-tinted bows of imitation silk. Society had recently been thunderstruck by the originality of putting a milking-stool in a drawing-room; its quaintness appealed with tremendous force to nearly all hearts; nearly every house-mistress on seeing a milking-stool in a friend's drawing-room, decided that she must have a milking-stool in her drawing-room, and took measures to get one. Clara was among the earlier possessors, the pioneers. Ten years--five years--before, Clara had appropriated the word "æsthetic" as a term of sneering abuse, with but a vague idea of its meaning; and now--such is the miraculous effect of time--she was caught up in the movement as it had ultimately spread to the Five Towns, a willing convert and captive, and nothing could exceed her scorn for that which once she had admired to the exclusion of all else. Into that mid-Victorian respectable house, situate in a rather old-fashioned street leading from Shawport Lane to the Canal, and whose boast (even when inhabited by non-conformists) was that it overlooked the Rectory garden, the new ideals of brightness, freshness, eccentricity, brittleness and impermanency had entered, and Auntie Hamps herself was intimidated by them.
Hilda gave polite but perfunctory praise. Left alone, she might not have been averse from the new ideals in their more expensive forms, but the influence of Edwin had taught her to despise them. Edwin's tastes in furniture, imbibed from the Orgreaves, neglected the modern, and went even further back than earliest Victorian. Much of the ugliness bought by his father remained in the Clayhanger house, but all Edwin's own purchases were either antique, or, if new, careful imitations of the pre-Victorian. Had England been peopled by Edwins, all original artists in furniture might have died of hunger. Yet he encouraged original literature. What, however, put Hilda against Clara's drawing-room suite, was not its style, nor its enamel, nor its frills, nor the obviously inferior quality of its varnish, but the mere fact that it had been exposed for sale in Nixon's shop-window in Duck Bank, with the price marked. Hilda did not like this. Now Edwin might see an old weather-glass in some frowsy second-hand shop at Hanbridge or Turnhill, and from indecision might leave it in the second-hand shop for months, and then buy it and hang it up at home,--and instantly it was somehow transformed into another weather-glass, a superior and personal weather-glass. But Clara's suite was not--for Hilda--thus transformed. Indeed, as she sat there in Clara's drawing-room, she had the illusion of sitting in Nixon's shop.