“Oh,” said Edward, “it is big. But let me put a case.” “What? Lawyering already?” scoffed Reuben. “Suppose one dislikes a cat. Fifty cats don’t reconcile one.” “You dislike the factory?” “I may not fully understand--” “Then wait till you do. Come here and learn.” “That would be the thin end of the wedge.” “It is meant to be,” said Reuben, and on that their conversation was, not inopportunely, interrupted. A clerk knocked on the door and announced Mr. Needham. “Don’t go, Edward,” said Reuben, “this can figure as a detail in your education,” and introduced his son to the caller. Edward looked hopelessly at the visitor. Reuben had told him that the office was the place where his business life was spent and therefore Edward’s contacts, if he came to the factory, would not be with the squalid people he had seen at work, but with people who visited the office. He looked at Mr. Needham, and decided that he had never seen a coarser or more brutal man in his life. There were certain fellows of his college justly renowned for grossness; there was the riffraff of the town, there were hangers-on at the stables, there were the bruisers he had seen, but in all his experience he had seen nothing comparable with the untrammeled brutishness of Mr. Richard Needham. If this was the company he was asked to keep, he preferred--what did one do _in extremis?_ Enlist? Well, then, he preferred enlistment to the factory. Needham was, however, not quite the usual caller, who was a merchant come to buy, or a machinist come to sell, rather than, as Needham was, a manufacturer and a notorious one at that. By this time, the repeal of the Combination Acts had given Trade Unionism an opportunity to develop in the open, and manufacturers who had known very well how to deal with the earlier guerilla warfare of the then illegal Unions were seriously alarmed by its progress. There was a strong movement to force the reënactment of the Combination Laws. Contemporaneously, the growth and proved efficiency of the power-loom drove the weavers to extremes. Needham was self-appointed leader of the reactionaries amongst the manufacturers: a man who had risen by sheer physical strength to a position from which he now exercised considerable influence over the more timid of the masters. He had the curtest of nods for Edward. “My God, Hepplestall, we’re in for a mort of trouble,” he said, mopping his brow with a huge printed handkerchief and putting his beaver hat on the desk. He sank into a stout chair which groaned under his weight, and Edward thought he had never seen anything so indecent as the swollen calves of Mr. Needham. Reuben silently passed the wine. It seemed a good answer. Warts are a misfortune, not a crime: but the wart on Mr. Needham’s nose struck Edward as an obscenity--and his father loved the factory! He didn’t know that he was unduly sensitive, but certainly Needham on top of his view of the workpeople made him queasy.