The plan succeeded.  For some years their first lodgers remained with them, and all went smoothly—­with that one sad exception of the little girl’s increasing deformity.  How that mother loved that child, it is not for words to tell!

Then came a break of misfortune.  Their lodgers left, and no one succeeded to them.  After some months, it became necessary to remove to a smaller house; and Alice’s tender conscience was torn by the idea that she ought not to be a burden to her mother-in-law, but to go out and seek her own maintenance.  And leave her child!  The thought came like the sweeping boom of a funeral-bell over her heart.

By and by, Mr Openshaw came to lodge with them.  He had started in life as the errand-boy and sweeper-out of a warehouse; had struggled up through all the grades of employment in it, fighting his way through the hard, striving Manchester life with strong, pushing energy of character.  Every spare moment of time had been sternly 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 colour 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 of 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 encumbrances 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 particular 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.