In Reuben’s, steam was the ideal: he knew nothing about it, had hardly heard of Arkwright or Hargreaves, Kay or Crompton who, amongst them, made the water-power factory; and Watt of the practicable steam-engine, Watt who gave us force and power, Watt the father of industrial civilization, the inventor who was not responsible for the uses others made of his inventions, so let us be equitable to his memory, let us not talk of him as either the world’s greatest scapegoat or its most fruitful accident--Watt was almost news to Reuben Hepplestall when he met Martin Everett in Manchester. The meeting was fortuitous. Everett, an architect, one of Arkwright’s men who had quarreled with him, was kicking his heels in the ante-room of a Manchester lawyer’s office when Reuben was shown in. Certainly, Reuben was not to be kept waiting by the lawyer as Everett, a suppliant, an applicant for capital, was likely to wait, but the lawyer was engaged and the two young men fell to talking. Everett, something of a fanatic for steam, the new, the unorthodox, the insurgent challenge to the landed men, at once struck fire on Hepplestall. He turned lecturer, steam’s propagandist, condemning waterpower as an archaism, and when Reuben admitted he had come to his lawyer for the very purpose of giving instructions for the sale of land and the initiation of plans for a factory on, he suggested, the banks of a river, Everett had small difficulty in converting him to steam. “I meant to bury Bantison,” said Reuben. “Now we’ll boil him.” Everett was puzzled. “You burn wood in your house, sir?” he asked. “And coal. Is it to the point?” “The coal is. You get it--where?” “There is a seam.” “Then that is the site of your factory.” “God!” said Hepplestall, “it will be a monstrous sight.” He spoke as if that gladdened him. “The building, sir, will have dignity,” the architect reproved him. “Aye? But I’m thinking of the engine. The furnace. The coal. A red herring? A smoked herring!” He relished the thought again. By steam (Lord, was he ever in the camp of those fantastical reactionaries, the Jacobites?), by steam he would symbolize his opposition to Whitworth and the Bloods. He was going into trade and so would be, anyhow, ostracized, but more than that, into steam, gambling on the new, the hardly tried, the strange power that the Bloods had only heard of to deride it; going into it blindly, on general hearsay, and the particular _ipse dixit_ of a young enthusiast who might be (except that Reuben trusted his insight and knew better) a charlatan or a deluded fool; and for Reuben there was the attraction of taking chances, of the impudent, audacious challenge to fortune and to the outraged Bloods.