Rupert was shown cotton from the mixing room where the bales of raw material were opened, through its processes of cleaning, combing, carding to the spinning-mill whence it emerged as yarn to go through warping and sizing to the weaving sheds and thence to the packing rooms where the pieces were made up and stamped for the home or the foreign markets. Hepplestall’s had their side-lines but principally they were concerned with the mass production of cotton shirtings and Rupert was given a kinematographic view of the making of a shirting till, stamped in blue with the world-famous “Anchor” brand, it was ready for the warehouse, which might be anywhere from Manchester to Valparaiso or Hongkong; and as they went through the rooms he was introduced to managers, to venerable overseers who had known his grandfather, fine loyalists who shook his hand as if he were indeed a prince, and everywhere he was conscious of eyes that bored into his back, envious, hostile sometimes, but mostly admiring and friendly. He was the heir. He walked, literally, for miles amongst these men and women and these children (there were children still in the mills of Lancashire, “half-timers,” which meant that they went to the factory for half the day, and to school the other half, and much good school did them after that exhilarating morning!), and he bore himself without confessing openly his consciousness that he was not so much inspecting the factory as being inspected by it. All that he saw, he loathed, and he couldn’t rid his mind of the thought that he was condemned to hard labor in these surroundings. But there were mitigations. “And,” said a white-haired overseer as he shook Rupert’s hand, “’appen we shall see you playing for Lanky-sheer one of these days.” “You have ambitions for me,” he smiled back. “Well, you’re on the road to it.” That was the delightful thing, that they should know that he was on the road to it. They must be keenly interested to know so much when his place in the Harrow first eleven was only a prospect--as yet--a pretty secure prospect, but one of those intimate securities which were decidedly not published news. It was a reconciling touch, bracing him to keep up his gallant show as they made their progress, but neither this nor the self-respecting deference of the high-salaried, efficient managers resigned him to the price he was expected to pay for being Hepplestall. That dour apprenticeship, which Sir Philip had candidly prophesied he would “hate like hell,” daunted him; those five years out of his life before he “began to work.” It was a tradition of the service, was it? Then it was a bad tradition. He didn’t object to serve, but this was to make service into slavery.