“His disapproval will be a testimony to it. I’ll see Peter,” said Reuben, and was away before the lawyer had opportunity to voice the score of stock arguments that age keeps handy for the correction of rash youth. He had then the more to say to Everett, the corrupter, the begetter in Reuben of his mad passion for steam, and it’s little satisfaction he got out of that. Young Everett was to realize a dream, he was to be given, he thought, a free hand to build a steam-driven factory as he thought a steam-driven factory ought to be built, and the prudent lawyer’s arguments, accusations, menaces, were no more to him than the murmurings a man hears in his sleep when what he sees is a vision splendid: it was only some time afterwards that Everett woke up to find in Hepplestall not the casual financier of his dream in stone, but a highly informed, critical collaborator who tempered zeal for steam with disciplined knowledge and contributed as usefully as Everett himself to make the “Dorothy” the finest instrument of its day for the manufacture of cotton. He got the knowledge chiefly from Bradshaw, partly from others who had carried manufacture beyond the narrow methods of Bradshaw’s water-wheel. It lay, this primitive factory, in a gentle valley amongst rounded hills of gritstone and limestone: a chilly country, lacking the warmth of the red earth of the South, backward in agriculture, nourishing more oats than wheat and, in the bleak uplands, incapable of tillage. Coarse grass fought there with heather, but if there was little color on the moors save when the heather flowered in royal purple and the gorse hung out its flame, there was rich green in the valleys and the polish of a humid atmosphere on healthy trees. A spacious rolling country, swelling to hills which, never spectacular, were still considerable: a clean country of wide views and lambent distances in those days before the black smoke came and seared. Not many miles away, sheltered amongst old elms, was Hepplestall’s own house; above it the hill known to be coal-bearing, where Everett was to build, on the hill top, the steam-driven factory, a beacon and a challenge to the old order. So, aptly to Reuben’s purpose, lay Bradshaw’s factory and house, the two in one and the whole as little intrusive on the scene as a farmhouse.