‘No cottage would be happy then.’
‘When I speak of poverty, I do not so much mean the natural, habitual poverty of the working-man, as the embarrassed penury of the man in debt; my grubworm is always a straitened, struggling, careworn tradesman.’
‘Cherish hope, not anxiety. Certain ideas have become too fixed in your mind. It may be presumptuous to say it, but I have the impression that there is something wrong in your notions of the best means of attaining happiness, as there is in—’
Second hesitation.
‘I am all ear, Caroline.’
‘In—(courage, let me speak the truth)—in your manner—mind, I say only manner—to these Yorkshire workpeople.’
‘You have often wanted to tell me that, have you not?’
‘Yes; often—very often.’
‘The faults of my manner are, I think, only negative. I am not proud; what has a man in my position to be proud of? I am only taciturn, phlegmatic, and joyless.’
‘As if your living cloth-dressers were all machines like your frames and shears; in your own house you seem different.’
‘To those of my own house I am no alien, which I am to these English clowns. I might act the benevolent with them, but acting is not my forte. I find them irrational, perverse; they hinder me when I long to hurry forward. In treating them justly, I fulfil my whole duty towards them.’
‘You don’t expect them to love you, of course?’
‘Nor wish it.’
‘Ah!’ said the monitress, shaking her head, and heaving a deep sigh.
With this ejaculation, indicative that she perceived a screw to be loose somewhere, but that it was out of her reach to set it right, she bent over her grammar, and sought the rule and exercise for the day.
‘I suppose I am not an affectionate man, Caroline; the attachment of a very few suffices me.’
‘If you please, Robert, will you mend me a pen or two before you go?’
‘First, let me rule your book, for you always contrive to draw the lines aslant.\td There now.\td\And now for the pens; you like a fine one, I think?’
‘Such as you generally make for me and Hortense; not your own broad points.’
‘If I were of Louis’s calling, I might stay at home and dedicate this morning to you and your studies; whereas I must spend it in Sykes’s wool-warehouse.’
‘You will be making money.’
‘More likely losing it.’
As he finished mending the pens, a horse, saddled and bridled, was brought up to the garden-gate.