They were all very heartily cynical about it, taking their formidable breakfast at Sir Harry’s, and no one more cynical than Whitworth. A parson more or less, what did it matter? There was none of that overnice regard for the sanctity of human life characteristic of the late nineteenth century, to which the early twentieth brought so drastic a corrective; but though they agreed on their collective attitude, there was nothing to prevent stray recollections coming to mind and the facts of the case were known to more than Whitworth and Hepple-stall. In public, it was apoplexy; in the wrong privacy it was still apoplexy, but in the right, there was censure of Hepplestall. True, the snuffing-out of Bantison was no more reprehensible in itself than the crushing of a gnat, but who knew that the habit of manslaughter, once acquired, might not grow on a man? It wasn’t worse than gossip, and idle whisper, but the whisper reached Hepplestall and he felt that it was not good for the man who hoped to marry Dorothy Verners to be the subject of gossip, however quiet. The gossip was more humorous than malicious, and it was confined to a circle, but that circle was the one which mattered and Reuben felt that in his rivalry with Whitworth he had suffered a rebuff through the death of Mr. Bantison. And there was that matter of the Stuarts. “Curse the Stuarts” was his feeling now towards that charming race; he saw them, with complete injustice, as first cause of his eclipse. Besides, if Bantison had detected him, there was the possibility of other open eyes. Altogether, the symbol of his defiance of Sir Harry seemed ill-chosen and the sooner he changed it the better. Something, he decided, was urgently required, not to silence chatter (for chatter in itself was good, proclaiming him exceptional), but to set tongues wagging so briskly with the new that they would forget to wag about the old. He felt the need of something to play the part of red herring across the trail, and his red herring took the sufficiently surprising shape of a cotton-mill. It surprised and scandalized the landed gentry, his friends of the Whitworth set, because the caste system was nearly watertight: certainly, of the two chief divisions, the landowners and the rest, Reuben belonged with the first, while cotton spinners were rated low amongst the rest. They were traders, of course, and not, at that stage, individually rich traders: the master spinners were spinners who had been men and rose by their own efforts to the control of other men. This was the pastoral age of cotton, going but not gone. It went, in one sense, when they harnessed machinery to water-power, but isolated factories on the banks of tumbling streams were related rather to the old regime of the scattered cottage hand-spinner and hand-weaver than to the coming era of the steam-made cotton town with its factories concentrated on the coal-fields; and, in the eyes of the gentry, steam was the infamy.