A mother is a mother still, the holiest thing alive.
This afternoon the brothers looked at each other with great love, but there was in it a sense of wariness; and Harry was inclined to bluff what he knew his brother would regard with inconvenient seriousness.
"Will you sit, Harry? Or are you going at once to mother? She is a bit anxious about you."
"I will sit with you half an hour, John. I want to talk with you. I am very unhappy."
"Nay, nay! You don't look unhappy, I'm sure; and you have no need to feel so."
"Indeed, I have. If a man hates his lifework, he is very likely to hate his life. You know, John, that I have always hated mills. The sight of their long chimneys and of the human beings groveling at the
bottom of them for their daily bread gives me a heartache. And the smell of them! O John, the smell of a mill sickens me!"
"What do you mean, Harry Hatton?"
"I mean the smell of the vaporous rooms, and the boiling soapsuds, and the oil and cotton and the moisture from the hot flesh of a thousand men and women makes the best mill in England a sweating-house of this age of corruption."