Bennett introduces the geographical setting of the novel’s first book. The two main characters, Constance and Sophia Baines, are teenage girls who live with their parents in Bursley, a fictionalized town in central England based on the English town of Burslem, one of the “Six Towns” that incorporated to become Stoke-on-Trent. The Baines home is above their shop on St. Luke’s Square. The girls they help their mother run a draper’s shop—selling wholesale cloth for making clothes. Constance (who’s 16 years old) and Sophia (who’s 15) watch Maggie, the family’s servant, through a window. Bennett describes them as “rather like racehorses, quivering with delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; […] exquisite, artful, roguish, prim, gushing, ignorant, and miraculously wise” (42). They watch Maggie as she greets a romantic interest in the street, and their reactions highlight the difference in the two girls’ characters: Sophia is a bit swifter to judge, and Constance is more willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to others—“foolishly good-natured” (44).

As Constance and Sophia return to their former activities, they hear a painful moaning outside their room: Samuel Povey, one of the shop assistants, has a toothache. (Book 1 refers to this character as “Mr.