Supposing even that he were merely to mention in the Five Towns that the Pension Frensham was kept by a Mrs. Scales.
'Scales?
Scales?' people might repeat.
'Now, what does that remind me of?'
And the ball might roll and roll till Constance or somebody picked it up! And then ...
Moreover--a detail of which she had at first unaccountably failed to mark the significance--this Peel-Swynnerton was a friend of the Mr. Povey as to whom he had inquired.
In that case it could not be the same Povey.
Impossible that the Peels should be on terms of friendship with Samuel Povey or his connections!
But supposing after all they were!
Supposing something utterly unanticipated and revolutionary had happened in the Five Towns!
She was disturbed.
She was insecure.
She foresaw inquiries being made concerning her.
She foresaw an immense family fuss, endless tomfoolery, the upsetting of her existence, the destruction of her calm.
And she sank away from that prospect.
She could not face it.
She did not want to face it.
"No," she cried passionately in her soul,
"I've lived alone, and I'll stay as I am.
I can't change at my time of life."
And her attitude towards a possible invasion of her solitude became one of resentment.
"I won't have it!
I won't have it!
I will be left alone.
Constance!
What can Constance be to me, or I to her, now?"
The vision of any change in her existence was in the highest degree painful to her.
And not only painful!
It frightened her.
It made her shrink.
But she could not dismiss it. ... She could not argue herself out of it.
The apparition of Matthew Peel-Swynnerton had somehow altered the very stuff of her fibres.
And surging on the outskirts of the central storm of her brain were ten thousand apprehensions about the management of the Pension.
All was black, hopeless.
The Pension might have been the most complete business failure that gross carelessness and incapacity had ever provoked.
Was it not the fact that she had to supervise everything herself, that she could depend on no one?
Were she to be absent even for a single day the entire structure would inevitably fall.
Instead of working less she worked harder.
And who could guarantee that her investments were safe?
When dawn announced itself, slowly discovering each object in the chamber, she was ill.
Fever seemed to rage in her head.
And in and round her mouth she had strange sensations.
Fossette stirred in the basket near the large desk on which multifarious files and papers were ranged with minute particularity.
"Fossette!" she tried to call out; but no sound issued from her lips.
She could not move her tongue.
She tried to protrude it, and could not.
For hours she had been conscious of a headache.
Her heart sank.
She was sick with fear.
Her memory flashed to her father and his seizure.