"Inconvenience me? a bachelor! Your society will be a great acquisition."
"And poor Ruth Candler—is she still living? She was a mother to me during my motherless infancy, and I shall be so glad to see her again. As to you, Mr. Wildegrave, I cannot express half the gratitude I feel for your disinterested kindness. The only circumstance which casts the least damp upon the pleasure I anticipate in my visit to Ashton, is the near vicinity of my father, who may take it into his head to imagine that I come there in order to be a spy upon his actions."
"I know the unhappy circumstances in which you are placed; yet I think that we shall be able to overrule them for your good. However disagreeable your intercourse with such a man must be, it is not prudent to lose sight of him altogether. While you are in his immediate neighborhood, he cannot easily forget that he has a son. That artful designing old scoundrel, Grenard Pike, will do all in his power to keep you apart. Your living with me will not affect Mr. Hurdlestone's pocket; and his seeing you at church will remind him, at least once a week, that you are alive."
"Church! Can a man destitute of charity feel any pleasure in attending a place of worship, that teaches him that his dearest enjoyment is a deadly sin?"
"It seems a strange infatuation; but I have remarked, that, let the weather be what it may, neither cold nor heat, nor storm nor shine, ever keeps Mark Hurdlestone from church. He is still in the old place; his fine grey locks flowing over his shoulders, with as proud and aristocratic an expression on his countenance as if his head were graced with a coronet, instead of being bound about with an old red handkerchief, which he wears in lieu of a hat; the rest of his person clothed in rags, which a beggar would spurn from him in disdain."
"Is he insensible to the disgust which his appearance must excite?"
"He seems perfectly at ease. His mind is too much absorbed in mental calculations to care for the opinion of any one. If you sit in the family pew, which I advise you to do, you will have to exercise great self-control to avoid laughing at his odd appearance."
"I am too much humiliated by his deplorable aberration of mind to feel the least inclination to mirth. I wish that I could learn to respect and love him as a father should be respected and loved; but since my last visit to Ashton my heart is hardened against him. A dislike almost amounting to loathing, has usurped the place of the affection which nature ever retains for those who are bound together by kindred ties."
"If you were more accustomed to witness his eccentricities you would be less painfully alive to their absurdity. Use almost reconciles us to anything. If you were to inhabit the same house with Mark Hurdlestone, and were constantly to listen to his arguments on the love of money, you might possibly fall in love with hoarding, and become like him a worshipper of gold."
"Avarice generally produces a reaction in the minds of those who witness its effects," said Anthony. "I will not admit the truth of your proposition, for experience has proved that the son of a miser commonly ends in being a spendthrift."