Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI - FIRST IMPRESSIONS

'There's iron, they say, in all our blood,

And a grain or two perhaps is good;

But his, he makes me harshly feel,

Has got a little too much of steel.'

ANON.

'Margaret!' said Mr. Hale, as he returned from showing his guest
downstairs; 'I could not help watching your face with some
anxiety, when Mr. Thornton made his confession of having been a
shop-boy. I knew it all along from Mr. Bell; so I was aware of
what was coming; but I half expected to see you get up and leave
the room.'

'Oh, papa! you don't mean that you thought me so silly? I really
liked that account of himself better than anything else he said.
Everything else revolted me, from its hardness; but he spoke
about himself so simply--with so little of the pretence that
makes the vulgarity of shop-people, and with such tender respect
for his mother, that I was less likely to leave the room then
than when he was boasting about Milton, as if there was not such
another place in the world; or quietly professing to despise
people for careless, wasteful improvidence, without ever seeming
to think it his duty to try to make them different,--to give them
anything of the training which his mother gave him, and to which
he evidently owes his position, whatever that may be. No! his
statement of having been a shop-boy was the thing I liked best of
all.'

'I am surprised at you, Margaret,' said her mother. 'You who were
always accusing people of being shoppy at Helstone! I don't I
think, Mr. Hale, you have done quite right in introducing such a
person to us without telling us what he had been. I really was
very much afraid of showing him how much shocked I was at some
parts of what he said. His father "dying in miserable
circumstances." Why it might have been in the workhouse.'

'I am not sure if it was not worse than being in the workhouse,'
replied her husband. 'I heard a good deal of his previous life
from Mr. Bell before we came here; and as he has told you a part,
I will fill up what he left out. His father speculated wildly,
failed, and then killed himself, because he could not bear the
disgrace. All his former friends shrunk from the disclosures that
had to be made of his dishonest gambling--wild, hopeless
struggles, made with other people's money, to regain his own
moderate portion of wealth. No one came forwards to help the
mother and this boy. There was another child, I believe, a girl;
too young to earn money, but of course she had to be kept. At
least, no friend came forwards immediately, and Mrs. Thornton is
not one, I fancy, to wait till tardy kindness comes to find her
out. So they left Milton. I knew he had gone into a shop, and