About this story
You leave on the seven-forty train with a commercial traveller, are left behind, and keep a pension in Paris through the siege, queueing at the butcher's for elephant meat while the mail goes by balloon. Forty-two chapters carry Sophia home to the matchbox she hands Constance, tooth still inside, in her last winter.
How it opens
Thursday afternoon closed nearly every shop in Bursley beneath calm spring light.
Baines's needed no signboard; respectability itself directed customers to its windows.
She has no gloves, and she is walking straight toward those men.
Choose
Maggie is allowed a suitor if she keeps him out of the kitchen.
Her twelfth engagement deserves more confidence than the first eleven.