Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/126

Rh Meanwhile he was surprised to ﬁnd Mr. Gaines oddly amenable to the proposed innovations, which he appeared to regard as new fashions in mill-management, to be adopted for the same cogent reasons as a new cut in coat-tails.

“Of course we want to be up-to-date—there’s no reason why the Westmore mills shouldn’t do as well by their people as any mills in the country,” he afﬁrmed, in the tone of the entertainer accustomed to say: “I want the thing done handsomely.” But he seemed even less conscious than Mrs. Westmore that each particular wrong could be traced back to a radical vice in the system. He appeared to think that every murmur of assent to her proposals passed the sponge, once for all, over the difﬁculty propounded: as though a problem in algebra should be solved by wiping it off the blackboard.

“My dear Bessy, we all owe you a debt of gratitude for coming here, and bringing, so to speak, a fresh eye to bear on the subject. If I’ve been, perhaps, a little too exclusively absorbed in making the mills proﬁtable, my friend Langhope will, I believe, not be the ﬁrst to—er—cast a stone at me.” Mr. Gaines, who was the soul of delicacy, stumbled a little over the awkward associations connected with this ﬁgure, but, picking himself up, hastened on to afﬁrm: “And in that respect, I think we can challenge comparison with any industry [ 112 ]