sence of Truscomb's
policy--and not the least of the qualities which made him a "paying"
manager--that he saved money scrupulously where its outlay would not
have resulted in larger earnings. To keep the floors scrubbed, the
cotton-dust swept up, the rooms freshly whitewashed and well-ventilated,
far from adding the smallest fraction to the quarterly dividends, would
have deducted from them the slight cost of this additional labour; and
Truscomb therefore economized on scrubbers, sweepers and window-washers,
and on all expenses connected with improved ventilation and other
hygienic precautions. Though the whole factory was over-crowded, the
newest buildings were more carefully planned, and had the usual sanitary
improvements; but the old mills had been left in their original state,
and even those most recently built were fast lapsing into squalor. It
was no wonder, therefore, that workers imprisoned within such walls
should reflect their long hours of deadening toil in dull eyes and
anaemic skins, and in the dreary lassitude with which they bent to their
tasks.

Surely, Amherst argued, Mrs. Westmore must feel this; must feel it all
the more keenly, coming from an atmosphere so different, from a life
where, as he instinctively divined, all was in harmony with her own
graceful person. But a deep disappointment awaited him. He was still
under the spell of their last moments in the carriage, when her face and
voice had promised so much, when she had seemed so deeply, if vaguely,
stirred by his appeal. But as they passed from one resounding room to
the other--from the dull throb of the carding-room, the groan of the
ply-frames, the long steady pound of the slashers, back to the angry
shriek of the fierce unappeasable looms--the light faded from her eyes
and she looked merely bewildered and stunned.

Amherst, hardened to the din of the factory, could not measure its
effect on nerves accustomed to the subdued sounds and spacious
stillnesses which are the last refinement of luxury. Habit had made him
unconscious of that malicious multiplication and subdivision of noise
that kept every point of consciousness vibrating to a different note, so
that while one set of nerves was torn as with pincers by the dominant
scream of the looms, others were thrilled with a separate pain by the
ceaseless accompaniment of drumming, hissing, grating and crashing that
shook the great building. Amherst felt this tumult only as part of the
atmosph