And, on the other side, was the tradition of obedience to her father, hard to break she knew, for she had failed often to break it, but not unbreakable; and there was one thing more. Of this she thought, as men think of all things that are too vast for their imagination’s canvas, in a concrete, limited manner: so are we compelled to picture God in the form of man. She thought of it as Ibble’s works and yards as she had seen them when she had gone with her mother to the launching of ships--bare tracts of granite setts, buildings in common stock brick that had the motley appearance of disease, sheds of corrugated iron, cranes that groped above her head, railway-lines that tripped her feet, cables coiled up like gigantic snakes, flames from darkness, the mutter of machinery and the creaking of belts, the glass roofs through which the light came blurred and thin. The foundries, where the molten metal grumbled and spat and threw up scum on the runner-cups, had been her childhood’s conception of hell. The whole place filled her with terror. She had seen the workmen, with their sullen, yellow faces streaked with machine-oil, and eyes dulled by labour into which imagination had never entered. Her life had been overshadowed by Ibble’s, and not her life only, but her father’s and mother’s lives. Her parents had been omnipotent in her nursery. What power was this, then, that stood behind _them_ and dominated _them_? She learned to think of Ibble’s as a tyrant inexorable because unapproachable; an immovable background against which alone the movements of life were visible, and in contrast to whose darkness life’s colours shone out. As she grew older she discovered that Ibble’s did not stand alone, but was a unit in a complex system, a string in a universal net. The nature and extent of the net itself were not clear. These facts stood out: that nearly all the world was in its meshes; that somehow inclusion in it was profitable; that those who thought to break it were fools and dreamers; that at any rate, though it was delicate and fragile so that the winds of fate blew it hither and thither, it was impossible to break. That was the first article in a traditional faith--impossible to break. Margaret had seen her own mother fight to get out of it, and seen her fail. This acquiescence in the matter of Ordith was the seal upon her failure.