ou'lt marry her if thou'st a mind," said Si to Herbert, "but I s'll
ne'er speak to thee again."

"But why, uncle?"

"That's why," said Si.

Now if you have been born in the Five Towns and been blessed with the
unique Five Towns mixture of sentimentality and solid sense, you don't
flare up and stamp out of the house when a well-to-do and childless
uncle shatters your life's dream. You dissemble. You piece the dream
together again while your uncle is looking another way. You feel that
you are capable of out-witting your uncle, and you take the earliest
opportunity of "talking it over" with Alice. Alice is sagacity itself.

Si's reasons for objecting so politely to the projected marriage were
various. In the first place he had persuaded himself that he hated
women. In the second place, though in many respects a most worthy man,
he was a selfish man, and he didn't want Herbert to leave him, because
he loathed solitude. In the third place--and here is the interesting
part--he had once had an affair with Alice's mother and had been cut
out: his one deviation into the realms of romance--and a disastrous one.
He ought to have been Alice's father, and he wasn't. It angered him,
with a cold anger, that Herbert should have chosen just Alice out of the
wealth of women in the Five Towns. Herbert was unaware of this reason at
the moment.

The youth was being driven to the conclusion that he would be compelled
to offend his uncle after all, when Alice came into two thousand two
hundred pounds from a deceased relative in Cheshire. The thought of
this apt legacy does good to my soul. I love people to come into a bit
of stuff unexpected. Herbert instantly advised her to breathe not a word
of the legacy to anyone. They were independent now, and he determined
that he would teach his uncle a lesson. He had an affection for his
uncle, but in the Five Towns you can have an affection for a person, and
be extremely and justly savage against that person, and plan cruel
revenges on that person, all at the same time.

Herbert felt that the legacy would modify Si's attitude towards the
marriage, if Si knew of it. Legacies, for some obscure and illogical
cause, do modify attitudes towards marriages. To keep a penniless
dressmaker out of one's family may be a righteous act. But to keep a
level-headed girl with two thousand odd of her own out of one's family
would be the act of an insensate fool. Therefore Herbert settled that Si
should not kno