michelle’s Reviews > The Old Wives' Tale > Status Update

A casual death, scarce noticed [...]. He lacked individuality. He was little. I have often laughed at Samuel Povey. But I liked & respected him. He was a very honest man. I have always been glad to think that, at the end of his life, destiny took hold of him & displayed, to the observant, the vein of greatness which runs through every soul without exception. He embraced a cause, lost it, and died of it.

Never in after-life are the genteel children of the Five Towns so richly clad as at the age of four or five years. Weeks of labour, thousands of cubic feet of gas, whole nights stolen from repose, eyesight, and general health, will disappear into the manufacture of a single frock that accidental jam may ruin in ten seconds.

The horror of what had occurred did not instantly take full possession of them, because the power of credence, of imaginatively realizing a supreme event, whether of great grief or of great happiness, is ridiculously finite.

*

Old houses, in the course of their history, see sad sights, and never forget them.

Still, she would have given much to see inside Sophia's lovely head. Ah! Could she have done so, what sleep-destroying wonders she would have witnessed! By what bright lamps burning in what mysterious grottoes and caverns of the brain would her mature eyes have been dazzled!

John Baines had belonged to the past, the age when men really did think of their souls, when no one learnt to hurry, when the beauty of life resided in its inflexible, slow dignity & a gilt-clasped Bible was the secret of England's greatness. Mid-Victorian England lay on that mahogany bed. It is thus that ideals die; not in the conventional pageantry of honoured death, but sorrily, ignobly, while one's head is turned

It is to be remembered that in those days Providence was still busying himself with everybody's affairs, & foreseeing the future in the most extraordinary manner. Thus, having foreseen that John Baines would have a "stroke" and need a faithful, tireless nurse, he had begun fifty years in advance by creating Aunt Maria, & had kept her carefully in misfortune's way, so that at the proper moment she would be ready.