se to keep Miss Sykes in gowns only?"

"Ha! ha! Excellent! I'll ask him that next time I see him. I'll roast
him for his presumption. But no doubt he expects old Christopher Sykes
would do something handsome. He is rich, is he not? They live in a large
house."

"Sykes carries on an extensive concern."

"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-bye, 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 connection, s