Shirley

propose to keep Miss Sykes in gowns only?«
    »Ha! ha! Excellent! I'll ask him that next time I see him. I'll roast him for his presumption: but no doubt he expects old Christopher Sykes would do something handsome. He is rich, is he not? They live in a large house.«
    »Sykes carries on an extensive concern.«
    »Therefore he must be wealthy, eh?«
    »Therefore he must have plenty to do with his wealth; and in these times would be about as likely to think of drawing money from the business to give dowries to his daughters as I should be to dream of pulling down the cottage there, and constructing on its ruins a house as large as Fieldhead.«
    »Do you know what I heard, Moore, the other day?«
    »No: perhaps that I
was
about to effect some such change. Your Briarfield gossips are capable of saying that or sillier things.«
    »That you were going to take Fieldhead on a lease – I thought it looked a dismal place, by-the-by, to-night, as I passed it – and that it was your intention to settle a Miss Sykes there as mistress; to be married, in short, ha! ha! Now, which is it? Dora – I am sure: you said she was the handsomest.«
    »I wonder how often it has been settled that I was to be married since I came to Briarfield! They have assigned me every marriageable single woman by turns in the district. Now it was the two Misses Wynns – first the dark, then the light one. Now the red-haired Miss Armitage, then the mature Ann Pearson; at present you throw on my shoulders all the tribe of the Misses Sykes. On what grounds this gossip rests, God knows. I visit nowhere – I seek female society about as assiduously as you do, Mr. Malone. If ever I go to Whinbury, it is only to give Sykes or Pearson a call in their counting-house; where our discussions run on other topics than matrimony, and our thoughts are occupied with other things than courtships, establishments, dowries: the cloth we can't sell, the hands we can't employ, the mills we can't run, the perverse course of events generally, which we cannot alter, fill our hearts, I take it, pretty well at present, to the tolerably complete exclusion of such figments as love-making, etc.«
    »I go along with you completely, Moore. If there is one notion I hate more than another, it is that of marriage: I mean marriage in the vulgar weak sense, as a mere matter of sentiment; two beggarly fools agreeing to unite their indigence by some fantastic tie of feeling – humbug! But an advantageous connexion, such as can be formed in consonance with dignity of views, and permanency of solid interests, is not so bad – eh?«
    »No,« responded Moore, in an absent manner; the subject seemed to have no interest for him: he did not pursue it. After sitting for some time gazing at the fire with a preoccupied air, he suddenly turned his head.
    »Hark!« said he: »did you hear wheels?«
    Rising, he went to the window, opened it, and listened. He soon closed it. »It is only the sound of the wind rising,« he remarked, »and the rivulet a little swollen, rushing down the hollow. I expected those waggons at six; it is near nine now.«
    »Seriously, do you suppose that the putting up of this new machinery will bring you into danger?« inquired Malone. »Helstone seems to think it will.«
    »I only wish the machines – the frames were safe here, and lodged within the walls of this mill. Once put up, I defy the framebreakers: let them only pay me a visit, and take the consequences: my mill is my castle.«
    »One despises such low scoundrels,« observed Malone, in a profound vein of reflection. »I almost wish a party would call upon you to-night; but the road seemed extremely quiet as I came along: I saw nothing astir.«
    »You came by the Redhouse?«
    »Yes.«
    »There would be nothing on that road: it is in the direction of Stilbro' the risk lies.«
    »And you think there is risk?«
    »What these fellows have done to others, they may do to me. There is only this difference: most of the manufacturers seem paralyzed when they are attacked. Sykes, for instance, when his dressing-shop was set on fire and burned to the ground, when the cloth was torn from his tenters and left in shreds in the field, took no steps to discover or punish the miscreants: he gave up as tamely as a rabbit under the jaws of a ferret. Now I, if I know myself, should stand by my trade, my mill, and my machinery.«
    »Helstone says these three are your gods; that the ›Orders in Council‹ are with you another name for