It was immediately after this that the “Centenary”—mispronounced in every manner conceivable—began to the town. Superior and persons, like the Orgreaves, had for weeks heard a good deal of vague talk about the Centenary from people whom intellectually they despised, and had to the Centenary as an and excusable affair which lacked interest for them. They were wrong. Edwin had gone further, and had at the Centenary, to everybody except his father. And Edwin was especially wrong. On the antepenultimate day of June he first uneasily suspected that he had committed a fault of . That was when his father brusquely announced that by request of the Mayor all places of business in the town would be closed in honour of the Centenary. It was the Centenary of the establishment of Sunday schools.  
Edwin hated Sunday schools. , he venomously resented them, though they had long ceased to incommode him. They were connected in his memory with atrocious , pietistic insincerity, and humiliating contacts. At the bottom of his mind he still regarded them as a device of parents for and inoffensive, helpless children. And he had a particular against them because he alone of his father’s offspring had been chosen for the . Why should his sisters have been spared and he ? He became really impatient when Sunday schools were under discussion, and from he would not admit that Sunday schools had any good qualities whatever. He knew nothing of their history, and wished to know nothing.
 
Nevertheless, when the day of the Centenary dawned—and dawned in splendour—he was compelled, even within himself, to treat Sunday schools with more consideration. And, in fact, for two or three days the force of public opinion had been changing his attitude from stern to a sort of half-hearted derision. Now, the derision was mysteriously transformed into an inimical respect. By what? By he knew not what. By something without a name in the air which the mind breathes. He felt it at six o’clock, ere he arose. Lying in bed he felt it. The day was to be a festival. The shop would not open, nor the printing office. The work of preparing for the removal would be suspended. The way of daily life would be quite changed. He was free—that was, nearly free. He said to himself that of course his excited father would expect him to witness the celebrations and to wear his best clothes, and that was a bore. But therein he was not quite honest. For he secretly wanted to witness the celebrations and to wear his best clothes. His curiosity was hungry. He admitted, what many had been asserting for weeks, that the Centenary was going to be a big thing; and his social instinct wished him to share in the pride of it.
 
“It’s a grand day!” exclaimed his father, cheerful and all as he looked out upon Duck Square before breakfast. “It’ll be rare and hot!” And it was a grand day; one of the dazzling spectacular blue-and-gold days of early summer. And Maggie was in finery. And Edwin too! Useless for him to pretend that a big thing was not afoot—and his father in a white waistcoat! Breakfast was talkative, though the conversation was but a repeating and repeating of what the arrangements were, and of what everybody had to do. The three lingered over breakfast, because there was no reason to hurry. And then even Maggie left the without a care, for though Clara was coming for dinner Mrs Nixon could be trusted. Mrs Nixon, if she had time, would snatch half an hour in the afternoon to see what remained to be seen of the show. Families must eat. And if Mrs Nixon was stopped by duty from assisting at this Centenary, she must hope to be more at liberty for the next.
 
Two.
At nine o’clock, in a most delicious mood of idleness, Edwin strolled into the shop. His father had taken down one from the , and it carelessly against another on the pavement. A blind man or a drunkard might have stumbled against it and knocked it over. The letters had been hastily opened. Edwin could see them lying in on the desk in the little office. The dust-sheets thought the day was Sunday. He stood in the narrow and looked . Duck Square was a of sunshine. The Dragon and the Duck and the other public-house at the top corner seemed as usual, confident in the thirst of populations. But the Dining Rooms, next door but one to the corner of Duck Square and Wedgwood Street, were not as usual. The cart of Doy, the butcher, had halted in front of the Borough Dining Rooms, and the anxious , attended by his two little daughters (aproned and sleeved for hard work in imitation of their , mother), was accepting unusual from it. weather for meat—you could see that from the man’s gestures. Even on ordinary days those low-ceiled dining-rooms, stretching far back from the street in a complicated of interiors, were apt to be crowded; for the quality of the eightpenny dinner could be relied upon. Edwin imagined what a , of culinary odours and they would be at one o’clock, at two o’clock.
 
Three hokey-pokey ice-cream hand-carts, one after another, turned the corner of Trafalgar Road and passed in front of him along Wedgwood Street. Three! The men pushing them, one an Italian, seemed to wear nothing but shirt and trousers, with a straw hat above and vague below. The steam-car up out of the valley of the road and climbed Duck Bank, throwing its enormous shadow to the left. It was half full of bright frocks and suits. An irregular current of finery was setting in to the gates of the Wesleyan School yard at the top of the Bank. And ceremoniously bedecked individuals of all ages hurried in this direction and in that, some with white handkerchiefs over flowered hats, a few beneath parasols. All the town’s store of Sunday clothes was in use. The humblest was crudely gay. had full tills and empty shops, for twenty-four hours.
 
Then a procession appeared, out of Moorthorne Road, from behind the Wesleyan Chapel-keeper’s house. And as it appeared it burst into music. First a purple banner, upheld on poles with lance-points; then a band in full note; and then children, children, children—little, middling, and big. As the procession curved down into Trafalgar Road, it grew in , until, towards the end of it, the children were as tall as the adults who walked as hens, proudly as peacocks, on its flank. And last came a railway lorry on which dozens of tiny infants had been penned; and the horses of the lorry were ribboned and their manes and tails tightly plaited; on that grand day they could not be allowed to protect themselves against flies; they were sacrificial animals.
 
A power not himself drew Edwin to the edge of the pavement. He could read on the immense banner: “Moorthorne Saint John’s Sunday School.” These, then, were church folk. And indeed the next moment he a curate among the peacocks. The procession made another curve into Wedgwood Street, on its way to the in Saint Luke’s Square. The band blared; the crimson cheeks of the trumpeters sucked in and out; the drummer leaned to balance his burden, and banged. Every soul of the company, big and little, was in a . The staggering bearers of the purple banner, who held the great poles in leathern from the shoulders, and their before and behind who kept the banner upright by straining at crimson halyards, sweated most of all. Every foot was grey with dust, and the dark trousers of boys and men showed dust. The steamy whiff of humanity struck Edwin’s . Up hill and down dale the procession had already walked over two miles. Yet it was alert, , and expectant: a procession. From the lorry rose a continuous faint of infantile voices. Edwin was saddened as by . I believe that as he gazed at the procession waggling away along Wedgwood Street he saw Sunday schools in a new light.
 
And that was the opening of the day. There were to be dozens of such processions. Some would start only in the town itself; but others were coming from the villages like Red Cow, five sultry miles off.
 
Three.
A young woman under a sunshade came slowly along Wedgwood Street. She was wearing a certain amount of finery, but her clothes did not fit well, and a thin was arranged so as to as much as possible the obviousness of the fact that she was about to become a mother. The expression of her face was discontented and . Edwin did not see her until she was close upon him, and then he immediately became self-conscious and awkward.
 
“Hello, Clara!” he greeted her, with his warm, transient smile, holding out his hand sheepishly. It was a most extraordinary and amazing thing that he could never regard the ceremony of shaking hands with a relative as other than an affectation of punctilio. Happily he was not wearing his hat; had it been on his head he would never have taken it off, and yet would have cursed himself for not doing so.
 
“We are grand!” exclaimed Clara, limply taking his hand and dropping it as an article of no interest. In her voice there was still some echo of former . The old Clara in her had not till that moment the smart and novel curves of Edwin’s Shillitoe suit, and the cry came unbidden from her heart.
 
Edwin gave an uneasy laugh, which was merely the for his disgust. Not that he was disgusted with Clara, for indeed marriage had a little the tediousness of some of her mannerisms, even if it had taken away from her charm. He was disgusted more comprehensively by the tradition, universal in his class and in most classes, according to which relatives could not be formally polite to one another. He obeyed the tradition as slavishly as anyone, but often said to himself that he would violate the sacred rule if only he could count on a suitable response; he knew that he could not count on a suitable response; and he had no mind to be in the excruciating position of one who, having started “God save the Queen” at a meeting, finds himself alone in the song. Why could not he and Clara behave together as, for instance, he and Janet Orgreave would behave together, with dignity, with worldliness, with ? But no! It was impossible, and would ever be so. They had been too intimate, and the result was irremediable.
 
“She’s got no room to talk about personal appearance, anyway!” he thought .
 
There was another extraordinary and amazing thing. He was ashamed of her condition! He could not help the feeling. In vain he said to himself that her condition was natural and proper. In vain he remembered the remark of the that a young woman in her condition was the most beautiful sight in the world. He was ashamed of it. And he did not think it beautiful; he thought it ugly. It worried him. W............