»Therefore he must be wealthy, eh?«
    »Therefore he must have plenty to do with his wealth; and in these times
would be about as likely to think of drawing money from the business to give
dowries to his daughters as I should be to dream of pulling down the cottage
there, and constructing on its ruins a house as large as Fieldhead.«
    »Do you know what I heard, Moore, the other day?«
    »No: perhaps that I was about to effect some such change. Your Briarfield
gossips are capable of saying that or sillier things.«
    »That you were going to take Fieldhead on a lease - I thought it looked a
dismal place, by-the-by, to-night, as I passed it - and that it was your
intention to settle a Miss Sykes there as mistress; to be married, in short, ha!
ha! Now, which is it? Dora - I am sure: you said she was the handsomest.«
    »I wonder how often it has been settled that I was to be married since I
came to Briarfield! They have assigned me every marriageable single woman by
turns in the district. Now it was the two Misses Wynns - first the dark, then
the light one. Now the red-haired Miss Armitage, then the mature Ann Pearson; at
present you throw on my shoulders all the tribe of the Misses Sykes. On what
grounds this gossip rests, God knows. I visit nowhere - I seek female society
about as assiduously as you do, Mr. Malone. If ever I go to Whinbury, it is only
to give Sykes or Pearson a call in their counting-house; where our discussions
run on other topics than matrimony, and our thoughts are occupied with other
things than courtships, establishments, dowries: the cloth we can't sell, the
hands we can't employ, the mills we can't run, the perverse course of events
generally, which we cannot alter, fill our hearts, I take it, pretty well at
present, to the tolerably complete exclusion of such figments as love-making,
etc.«
    »I go along with you completely, Moore. If there is one notion I hate more
than another, it is that of marriage: I mean marriage in the vulgar weak sense,
as a mere matter of sentiment; two beggarly fools agreeing to unite their
indigence by some fantastic tie of feeling - humbug! But an advantageous
connexion, such as can be formed in consonance with dignity of views, and
permanency of solid interests,