"In (courage! let me speak the truth)—in your manner—mind, I say only manner—to these Yorkshire workpeople."
"You have often wanted to tell me that, have you not?"
"Yes; often—very often."
"The faults of my manner are, I think, only negative. I am not proud. What has a man in my position to be proud of? I am only taciturn, phlegmatic, and joyless."
"As if your living cloth-dressers were all machines like your frames and shears. In your own house you seem different."
"To those of my own house I am no alien, which I am to these English clowns. I might act the benevolent with them, but acting is not my forte. I find them irrational, perverse; they hinder me when I long to hurry forward. In treating them justly I fulfil my whole duty towards them."
"You don't expect them to love you, of course?"
"Nor wish it."
"Ah!" said the monitress, shaking her head and heaving a deep sigh. With this ejaculation, indicative that she perceived a screw to be loose somewhere, but that it was out of her reach to set it right, she bent over her grammar, and sought the rule and exercise for the day.
"I suppose I am not an affectionate man, Caroline. The attachment of a very few suffices me."