“I have the whim,” said Reuben and saw astonishment fade from Peter’s face. They had their whims, these gentry, and indulged them, and if Hepplestall’s was the eccentric one of wishing to experience in his own person the life of a factory hand, why, it wasn’t for Bradshaw to oppose him. And Peter smiled aside when Reuben said that he would try it for a week. A week! A day of such toil would cure any fine gentleman of such a caprice. But Peter was to be surprised again, he was to find Reuben not tiring in a day, nor in a week, not to be tempted from the factory even by a cock-fight to which Peter and half his men went as a matter of course, dropping the discipline of hours and forgetting in a common sportsmanship that they ranked as master and man--oh, those gentler days before the Frankenstein, machinery, quite gobbled up man who made him!--but as time went on, still, after three months, working as spinner at Peter’s water-driven jennies and becoming as highly skilled as any man about the place. Even when the truth was out, when most of Hepplestall’s acres had gone to the hammer, and one could see from Bradshaw’s window the nascent walls of Reuben’s factory, Peter was still obtuse, still happy at the thought of the honor done to cotton by the Olympian, still blind to the implications of the coming into spinning, so near to him, of a capitalist on the greater scale. He was to be cured of that blindness, but what, even if he had foreseen the future from the beginning, could he have done? In the matter of Phoebe, no doubt, he could have acted, he could have sent her away; but Hepplestall in other matters was not so much mere man as the representative of steam. What could he have done to counter steam? Bradshaw was doomed and steam was his undoing, and, though the particular instrument, Hepplestall, was to have, for him, a peculiar malignancy, the seeds of his ruin were sown in his own obstinate conservatism. He had seen visions of a great progress when water-power superseded arm-power, but his vision stopped short of steam. Peter was growing old. CHAPTER III--PHOEBE BRADSHAW IF Hepplestall calculated much, which is a damnable vice in youth, it is possibly some consolation to know that he miscalculated the effect upon the county of his plunge, for at this stage his eclipse was total and he had not anticipated that. They did not forget Bantison in remembering the rising walls of his factory, and still less in the thought that Reuben who had sat at their tables was working with his hands as a spinner. They added offense to offense; if he was seen he was cut; and their chatter reached him even at Bradshaw’s where, as he knew very well, gentry talk must be loud indeed to penetrate.