ternly given up to self-
teaching. He was a capital accountant, a good French and German scholar,
a keen, far-seeing tradesman; understanding markets, and the bearing of
events, both near and distant, on trade: and yet, with such vivid
attention to present details, that I do not think he ever saw a group of
flowers in the fields without thinking whether their colours would, or
would not, form harmonious contrasts in the coming spring muslins and
prints. He went to debating societies, and threw himself with all his
heart and soul into politics; esteeming, it must be owned, every man a
fool or a knave who differed from him, and overthrowing his opponents
rather by the loud strength of his language than the calm strength if his
logic. There was something of the Yankee in all this. Indeed his theory
ran parallel to the famous Yankee motto--"England flogs creation, and
Manchester flogs England." Such a man, as may be fancied, had had no
time for falling in love, or any such nonsense. At the age when most
young men go through their courting and matrimony, he had not the means
of keeping a wife, and was far too practical to think of having one. And
now that he was in easy circumstances, a rising man, he considered women
almost as incumbrances to the world, with whom a man had better have as
little to do as possible. His first impression of Alice was indistinct,
and he did not care enough about her to make it distinct. "A pretty yea-
nay kind of woman," would have been his description of her, if he had
been pushed into a corner. He was rather afraid, in the beginning, that
her quiet ways arose from a listlessness and laziness of character which
would have been exceedingly discordant to his active energetic nature.
But, when he found out the punctuality with which his wishes were
attended to, and her work was done; when he was called in the morning at
the very stroke of the clock, his shaving-water scalding hot, his fire
bright, his coffee made exactly as his peculiar fancy dictated, (for he
was a man who had his theory about everything, based upon what he knew of
science, and often perfectly original)--then he began to think: not that
Alice had any peculiar merit; but that he had got into remarkably good
lodgings: his restlessness wore away, and he began to consider himself as
almost settled for life in them.

Mr. Openshaw had been too busy, all his life, to be introspective. He
did not know that he had any tenderness