Phoebe had borne him a son. Reuben had not decided--he had not had time to decide--but he didn’t think that mattered. If he was going to marry her--to silence her he had promised marriage and, so far as he knew, intended to keep his promise--it was because he had a fondness for her but, beyond that, because he hoped to see the county cringe to his wife, and if it was going to please him to watch them cringe to a Mrs. Reuben Hepplestall who was Peter Bradshaw’s daughter, it was going to please him more to watch them cringe to a woman who was the mother of his son before he married her. That was his present view, and because of it he permitted Peter to jog on at his little factory, he didn’t starve Peter out of existence as he was starving the other water-power manufacturers of the neighborhood, he wasn’t forcing Peter’s workpeople into the steam factory by the simple process of leaving them no other place in which to find employment. Peter was privileged, a King Canute miraculously untouched by the tide of progress; but, for the rest of them, for Peter’s like who were unprivileged, Reuben was ruthless. He wanted their skilled laborers in his factory, and he undercut their prices, naturally, thanks to steam, and unnaturally, thanks to policy, till he drove them to ruin, filled his factory with their workpeople, sometimes flinging an overseer’s job to the manufacturer he had ruined, sometimes ignoring him. He was building a second factory now, out of the profits of the first. He had to rise, to rise, to go on rising till he dominated the county, till the gentry came to pay court to the man they had flouted. That was the day he lived for, the day when they would fawn and he would show them--perhaps with Phoebe by his side--what it meant to be a Hepplestall in Lancashire. In his mine there were hewers of coal, in the factory men, women and children, laboring extravagant hours for derisory pay to the end that Hepplestall might set his foot upon the county’s neck. All this was background; motive, certainly, but motive so covert beneath the daily need to plan fresh enterprise, to produce cotton yarn by the thousand pounds and cloth by the mile as never to obtrude into his conscious thought at all. This was his interim of building and till he had built securely he could not pause to think of other issues. The county, for example: he wasn’t speculating as to where he stood with the county now: the time for the county’s attention would come when he stood, a grown colossus, over it and he was only growing yet. He didn’t anticipate that the county would make advances at this stage, that to some of them this stage might seem already advanced while to him, with his head full of plans for development, the stage was elementary. He didn’t anticipate Luke Verners.