The Emptiness of Ease — North and South

London and Harley Street. Aunt Shaw's household is comfortable, social, and entirely well-intentioned, and Margaret cannot settle. The ease of the life available to her, the calls and dinners and the absence of any requirement beyond social grace, is not what she needs but she cannot quite name what she does need in a way that her aunt can address. News from Milton arrives through Dixon's letters, practically framed but containing, every now and then, a quotation of Thornton's opinion on some matter, and Margaret reads these references with an attentiveness she does not examine. The orchard at Helstone, she learns, has been replaced by warehouses, which is the plainest possible image of the irreversibility of what has happened to the England she was formed in. Social encounters in London require a composure that Margaret has in excess and a depth that she finds few people can meet. The awkward social call involving Henry Lennox allows Gaskell to show her recovering her public function first while privately managing something she will not say. The chapter closes on a social farewell, see you in Harley Street tomorrow morning, which is the form that everything not being said takes in this part of the novel.