and a regulation pattern? Why have a human criterion? There's the
point! Why, in the name of all the free heavens, have human
criteria? Why? Simply for bullying and narrowness.

Alvina felt at her ease with Miss Pinnegar. The two women talked
away to one another, in their quiet moments: and slipped apart like
conspirators when Miss Frost came in: as if there was something to
be ashamed of. If there was, heaven knows what it might have been,
for their talk was ordinary enough. But Alvina liked to be with Miss
Pinnegar in the kitchen. Miss Pinnegar wasn't competent and
masterful like Miss Frost: she was ordinary and uninspired, with
quiet, unobserved movements. But she was deep, and there was some
secret satisfaction in her very quality of secrecy.

So the days and weeks and months slipped by, and Alvina was hidden
like a mole in the dark chambers of Manchester House, busy with
cooking and cleaning and arranging, getting the house in her own
order, and attending to her pupils. She took her walk in the
afternoon. Once and only once she went to Throttle-Ha'penny, and,
seized with sudden curiosity, insisted on being wound down in the
iron bucket to the little workings underneath. Everything was quite
tidy in the short gang-ways down below, timbered and in sound order.
The miners were competent enough. But water dripped dismally in
places, and there was a stale feeling in the air.

Her father accompanied her, pointed her to the seam of
yellow-flecked coal, the shale and the bind, the direction of the
trend. He had already an airy-fairy kind of knowledge of the whole
affair, and seemed like some not quite trustworthy conjuror who had
conjured it all up by sleight of hand. In the background the miners
stood grey and ghostly, in the candle-light, and seemed to listen
sardonically. One of them, facile in his subordinate way as James in
his authoritative, kept chiming in:

"Ay, that's the road it goes, Miss Huffen--yis, yo'll see th' roof
theer bellies down a bit--s' loose. No, you dunna get th' puddin'
stones i' this pit--s' not deep enough. Eh, they come down on you
plumb, as if th' roof had laid its egg on you. Ay, it runs a bit
thin down here--six inches. You see th' bed's soft, it's a sort o'
clay-bind, it's not clunch such as you get deeper. Oh, it's easy
workin'--you don't have to knock your guts out. There's no need for
shots, Miss Huffen--we bring it down--you see here--" And he
stooped, pointing to a shallow, shelvi