In sober fact young Hepplestall was intellectually superior to his contemporaries and, aware of it, resented the deference they paid to Sir Harry, the man of acres, the Beau, the Corinthian, the frequenter of White’s and Almack’s, leader unchallenged of local society. By his clandestine unorthodoxy, by his perpetual balancing on a tight-rope, he expressed to himself his opposition to Sir Harry; and there was Dorothy Verners, predestined in the eyes of the county for Sir Harry, waiting only for a question which would have the force of a command. Reuben had, in secret, his own idea of the future of Dorothy Verners. He aspired where he knew himself fitted to aspire, but the county would have dissolved in contemptuous guffaws at the thought of Reuben Hepplestall in the character of rival to Sir Harry. He brooded darkly in rebellion, outwardly accepting Whitworth’s social despotism, inwardly a choked furnace of ambition. It was little Bantison who involuntarily played the god in the machine and died that the Hepplestalls might be cotton lords in Lancashire. Bantison was not prepossessing; a short man, gross of body with a face like raw beef and hands offensively white, dressed in his clerical coat on which spatters of snuff and stains of wine smirked like a blasphemy, endowed with fine capacity for other people’s Burgundy and distinguished by an eye that earned him, by reason rather of alertness than deformity, the nickname of “Swivel-Eyed Jack.” Some vicars, like Goldsmith’s, were content with forty pounds a year; the Reverend Mr. Bantison had that limited stipend with unlimited desires, and contrived by the use of his alert eye and the practice of discreet blackmail to lead a bachelor life of reasonable amplitude. Not to be nice about the fellow, he was as unprincipled a wolf as ever masqueraded in a sheepskin; but he is not to infest this narrative for long. They were at table at Sir Harry Whitworth’s, who dined at six o’clock, latish, as became a man of fashion. There was acquiescence in that foible, but no imitation of a habit which was held to be an arbitrary encroachment on the right to drink. The ladies had, in strict moderation, to be treated civilly--at any rate, the ladies had to eat--so that Sir Harry’s guests rarely drew up to the mahogany for the serious entertainment of the evening before eight o’clock, and a man of a position less assured than his would have been suspected of meanness and too great care for the contents of his cellar. But Whitworth was Whitworth and they shrugged their shoulders. After all, with good will and good liquor one can achieve geniality in an evening not beginning (for serious purposes) until eight.