‘He might have said that you were spoilt either for a miller or for anything else,’ retorted Fan. ‘If he had done so, it would have been the result of an old-fashioned prejudice; and if I had been able to show him that he was in the wrong, he would have been the first to admit it gladly,’ said Oliver, keeping his temper. ‘Why, on earth, should a man not make as good a miller—or coal-heaver for that matter—because he knows a little Latin and Greek, and can read Horace and Virgil, Sophocles and Plato, in the original, if he chose, when his work is done?’ Fan was getting desperate. No one save herself could tell how grievous had been the downfall of all the castles in the air which she had been building since her earliest girlhood, while she sat or stood, during the last half-hour, in the familiar mill gallery, looking down, as she had looked many a time before, on the lovely home landscape, in the midsummer twilight, and only betraying her emotion by her changing colour and tightly clasped hands. It was all so utterly wrong-headed and delirious in Oliver; what one might have expected in a French Communist, but what one could never have imagined would find a fitting soil at Oxford. Fan had prepared herself for so different a conclusion. She would have done anything, taken any pains and faced any ordeal for Oliver—the Oliver of her dreams. Had he been called to fill a throne, she would have toiled to qualify herself to stand on its lowest step. She was one of those women who have high enterprise in their composition. But if Oliver’s regalia were to consist, after all, of the mill-wheel and the baker’s oven, which had been thorns in Fan’s flesh when they were connected with her father and grandfather, she had not the enterprise to follow her brother in that adventure. ‘Oh! Oliver, if you would only think it all over again!’ besought Fan, with tears, which she had too much pride and endurance to shed, dimming her bright dark eyes, as the evening star came out above the Copley Grange woods, and glimmered over the two. ‘You have been away from home, for the most part, for years and years, ever since you were little more than a boy. You have forgotten what the conditions of a tradesman’s life really are, how hopelessly commonplace and vulgar—worse in some respects than the life of a day labourer. There may be some dignity in hard toil and grinding poverty bravely borne—though I should not like to be the one to bear them,’ said Fan, in parenthesis; yet even as she spoke Oliver recognised that this worldly-minded little sister of his was a woman who, in the circumstances she referred to, would have been found capable of working herself to death and making no sign, dying with the elements of true tragedy and pathos in the self-respecting silence and resignation of her humble end. ‘But I cannot see how there can be dignity in ordinary buying and selling, in low chaffering and huxtering, and often cheating.’