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Si’s reasons for objecting so politely to the projected marriage were various. In the first place he had persuaded himself that he hated women. In the second place, though in many respects a most worthy man, he was a selfish man, and he didn’t want Herbert to leave him, because he loathed solitude. In the third place–and here is the interesting part–he had once had an affair with Alice’s mother and had been cut out: his one deviation into the realms of romance–and a disastrous one. He ought to have been Alice’s father, and he wasn’t. It angered him, with a cold anger, that Herbert should have chosen just Alice out of the wealth of women in the Five Towns. Herbert was unaware of this reason at the moment.

The youth was being driven to the conclusion that he would be compelled to offend his uncle after all, when Alice came into two thousand two hundred pounds from a deceased relative in Cheshire. The thought of this apt legacy does good to my soul. I love people to come into a bit of stuff unexpected. Herbert instantly advised her to breathe not a word of the legacy to anyone. They were independent now, and he determined that he would teach his uncle a lesson. He had an affection for his uncle, but in the Five Towns you can have an affection for a person, and be extremely and justly savage against that person, and plan cruel revenges on that person, all at the same time.

Herbert felt that the legacy would modify Si’s attitude towards the marriage, if Si knew of it. Legacies, for some obscure and illogical cause, do modify attitudes towards marriages. To keep a penniless dressmaker out of one’s family may be a righteous act. But to keep a level-headed girl with two thousand odd of her own out of one’s family would be the act of an insensate fool. Therefore Herbert settled that Si should not know of the legacy. Si should be defeated without the legacy, or he should be made to suffer the humiliation of yielding after being confronted with the accomplished fact of a secret marriage. Herbert was fairly sure that he would yield, and in any case, with a couple of thousand at his wife’s back, Herbert could afford to take the risks of war.

So Herbert, who had something of the devil in him, approached his uncle once more, with a deceitful respect, and he was once more politely rebuffed–as indeed he had half hoped to be. He then began his clandestine measures–measures which culminated in him leaving the house one autumn morning dressed in a rather stylish travelling suit.

The tramcar came down presently from Hanbridge. Not one of the swift thunderous electrical things that now chase each other all over the Five Towns in every direction at intervals of about thirty seconds; but the old horse-car that ran between Hanbridge and Bursley twice an hour and no oftener, announcing its departure by a big bell, and stopping at toll-gates with broad eaves, and climbing hills with the aid of a tip-horse and a boy perched on the back thereof. That was a calm and spacious age.

Herbert boarded the car, and raised his hat rather stiffly to a nice girl sitting in a corner. He then sat down in another corner, far away from her. Such is the capacity of youth for chicane! For that nice girl was exactly Alice, and her presence on the car was part of the plot. When the car arrived at Bursley these monsters of duplicity descended together, and went to a small public building and entered therein, and were directed to an official and inhospitable room which was only saved from absolute nakedness by a desk, four Windsor chairs, some blotting-paper, pens, ink and a copy of Keats’s Directory of the Five Towns. An amiable old man received them with a perfunctory gravity, and two acquaintances of Herbert’s strolled in, blushing. The old man told everybody to sit down, asked them questions of no spiritual import, abruptly told them to stand up, taught them to say a few phrases, in the tone of a person buying a ha’-porth of tin-tacks, told them to sit down, filled a form or two, took some of Herbert’s money, and told them that that was all, and that they could go. So they went, secretly surprised. This was the august ritual, and this the imposing theatre, provided by the State in those far-off days for the solemnizing of the most important act in a citizen’s life. It is different now; the copy of Keats’s Directory is a much later one.