“Well, Mary Ellen,” he said, using her full name which certainly was normal in Lancashire where the Mary Ellens and the John Thomases are almost double-barreled names, “this is Staithley. How well do you remember it? Is there a road round the mills?” “I think so,” she said, “but you’ll meet cobbles.” “It’s Staithley,” he said, and drove the circuit of the mills in silence. “Um,” he said. “London. Furthest East, which is the Aldwych Theater, to Furthest West, which is the St. James, to Furthest North, which is the Oxford, and back East by Drury Lane. We’ve driven further than that round these mills. Somebody once mentioned to me that they’re big. There’s a coal mine, too, that’s a bit of detail nobody bothers to think of. Well, is there any way of looking down on this village?” “There’s Staithley Edge,” she said. “There’s a road up by the Drill Hall.” “Point it out,” he said. “You understand that we’re doing this to give Aunt Gertrude time to powder her nose. It isn’t really a waste of petrol.” Whatever it was, and certainly she found no harsh reactions here, they were doing it in the dark which fell like a benediction on Staithley. Their wheels churned up rich mud of the consistency, since for days it had been fine, of suet pudding, and the road, worn by the heavy traffic of the mills, bumped them inexorably. “Staithley!” he said. “Staithley!” but she did not detect contempt. They reached the Drill Hall and the Square, unchanged except by a War Memorial and a cinema, and turned into the street up which she had once gazed while Mr. Chown waited, ill-lighted, ill-paved, a somber channel between two scrubby rows of deadly uniform houses. “Staithley goes home,” Tom Bradshaw had said, and this was where an appreciable percentage of it had gone; but neither Rupert nor Mary were being sociological now. She did not know what he was thinking; she thought of Staithley Edge and of the moors beyond, wondering a little why she should find Staithley so good when it was so good to get out of it up here. A tang of burning peat assailed her nostrils, indicating that they had reached the height where peat from, the moors cost less than coal from the pits, and soon the upland air blew coolly in their faces as they left the topmost house behind. The road led on, over the hill, across the moor which showed no signs, in the darkness, of men’s ravaging handiwork, but at the first rise Rupert stopped the car and got out.