a girl in the village once called Lizzie McCamley ... a
fine bit of a girl, too, big and strong, an' full of fun, an' she got
tired of the village. Her father was a labourer, an' all she could see
in front of her was the life of a labourer's wife. Well, it isn't much
of a life, that, an' Lizzie's mother had a poor life even for a
labourer's wife because McCamley boozed. I don't blame Lizzie for
wantin' somethin' better than that. I'd have despised her if she hadn't
wanted somethin' better. But what did she do? She had an uncle in
Belfast workin' in your grandfather's mill, an' she came to me an' she
asked me to use my influence with your grandfather to get her a job in
the mill. An' I did. An' by God, I'm sorry for it! I'll rue it 'til my
dyin' day, I can tell you!"

"But why, father!"

"Your grandfather gave her a job in the weavin' room of his mill. Do you
know what that's like, Henry?" Henry shook his head. He had never been
inside a linen-mill. "The linen has to be woven in a moist atmosphere,
or else it'd become brittle an' so it wouldn't be fine," Mr. Quinn went
on; "an' the atmosphere is kept moist by lettin' steam escape from pipes
into the room where the linen is bein' woven--a damp, muggy, steamy
atmosphere, Henry ... an' Lizzie McCamley left this village ... left
work in the fields there to go up to Belfast an' work in that for ten
shillin's a week! An' that's what people calls progress! I wish you
could see her now--half rotten with disease, her that was the healthiest
girl in the place before she went away. She's always sick, that girl,
an' she can't eat anythin' unless her appetite is stimulated with stuff
like pickles. She's anaemic an' debilitated, an' the last time I saw her,
she'd got English cholera.... She married a fellow that was as sick as
herself, an' she had a child that wasn't fit to be born ... it died,
thank God!... an' then she went back to her work an' became sicker. An'
she'll go on like that 'til she dies, a rotten, worn-out woman, the
mother of rotten children when she ought to have had fine healthy brats,
an' could have had them too, if it hadn't been for this damned progress
we're all makin'!"

Henry did not reply to his father. He did not know what to reply. His
mind was still in the pliable state, and he found that he was being
infected by his father's passion. But he had been taught at Rumpell's to
believe in Invention, in Progress by the Development of Machinery, and
so his min