Reuben was guiltless of personal malignancy. He had decided that the Bradshaws must not be favorites, that they must do as others did, which was a judgment, not a spite, and Reuben did not control the system, but was controlled by it. He, like the Bradshaws, must do as others did. He could, of course, have got out: his difference from them was that he could abjure cotton. But he did not do that, and so long as he stayed in, a competitor with other manufacturers, he was obliged, if he would survive commercially, to use the methods of the rest. They may or may not have been methods that revolted him by their barbarity, and it is probable that, even in that callous age, what of the true gentleman was left in him was, in fact, revolted. That is, at least, to be deduced from the completely isolating veil he hung between Dorothy and the factory. His house was the old home of the Hepplestalls, near the factory but not, like many manufacturers’ houses, adjacent to it. It was sufficiently far away for him, practically, to live two lives which did not meet. He was a manufacturer and he was the husband of Dorothy’ Hepplestall; in the factory one man and at home another, not lying at home about steam because there he never spoke of it, preserving her romantic illusions about his work by keeping her remote from it. She might have had her curiosities, but she loved Reuben, she consented at his will to be incurious and the habit remained. It might have remained even if love had faded, but their love was not to fade. And the county took it that if Dorothy Verners had married a manufacturer, the factory was not to be mentioned before her. In the presence of ladies they did not mention it to Reuben, though, in the bad times, when the poor-rate rose and half the weavers came upon the parish, Reuben was roasted to his face with indignant heat after the ladies had left the table. He was neither of the best nor of the worst. He was not patriarchal like the Strutts and the Gregs who, while conforming to the System, qualified it with school-houses and swimming baths, nor did he go to the extreme of ordering his people into the cottages he built and compelling them to pay rent for a cottage whether they occupied it or not. He didn’t run shops, charging high prices, at which his people had to buy or where they had to take goods in part payment of wages. Such devices, though general, seemed to him petty and extraneous to the factory; but in the factory he was a keen economist and one of the results of the System was that the masters looked on wages not as paid to individuals but to families. That was so much the normal view that a weaver was not allowed to go on the parish unless he proved that his wife and children worked in the mills and that the whole family wage was inadequate for their support.