To-day the first number of _The Five Towns Chronicle_ was to go to press.... The delays had been inexplicable and exasperating to Hilda, though she had not criticized them, even to herself; they were now over. The town had no air of being excited about the appearance of its new paper. But the office was excited. The very room itself looked feverish. It was changed; more tables had been brought into it, and papers and litter had accumulated enormously; it was a room humanized by habitation, with a physiognomy that was individual and sympathetic. From beyond the closed door of the inner room came the sound of men's rapid voices. Hilda could distinguish Mr. Cannon's and Arthur Dayson's; there was a third, unfamiliar to her. Having nothing to do, she began to make work, rearranging the contents of her table, fingering with a factitious hurry the thick bundles of proofs of correspondence from the villages (so energetically organized by the great Dayson), and the now useless 'copy,' and the innumerable letters, that Dayson was always disturbing, and the samples of encaustic tiles brought in by an inventor who desired the powerful aid of the press, and the catalogues, and Dayson's cuttings from the Manchester, Birmingham, and London papers, and the notepaper and envelopes and cards, and Veale Chifferiel & Co.'s almanac that had somehow come up with other matters from Mr. Karkeek's office below. And then she dusted, with pursed lips that blamed the disgraceful and yet excusable untidiness of men, and then she examined, with despair and with pride, her dirty little hands, whose finger-tips all clustered together (they were now like the hands of a nice, careless schoolboy), and lightly dusted one against the other. Then she found a galley-proof under the table. It was a duplicate proof of _The Five Towns Chronicle's_ leading article, dictated to her by a prodigious Arthur Dayson, in Mr. Cannon's presence, on the previous day, and dealing faithfully with "The Calder Street Scandal" and with Mr. Enville, a member of the Local Board--implicated in the said scandal. The proof was useless now, for the leader-page was made up. Nevertheless, Hilda carefully classified it "in case..." IV