any difference, her dress was more scrupulously clean and more precisely, and primly fitted, and pinned more smooth and neat, than the dresses of the other girls. But she was clearly a woman of a higher cast; you saw it in her turn of features, her expression, her intercourse with her fellow-workers and the manager. Although she was quite a young woman, and not unusually skilled in her trade, there was a tacit respect paid to her, that unconscious demonstration which often marks the difference between inevitable “just supremacy” and unwarrantable usurpation. No one in the Mile-end Mill accused Letty Brown of airs or resented her dignity: and mill “hands” are notoriously shrewd observers. They did not take to her much; they did not like her over much; she was a woman to be trusted and treated with indifference at that stage, by the many as beyond their comprehension and their instincts, and to be loved engrossingly by the few.
In the same way there are characters which by natural impulse, as flowers turn to the sun, turn to whatever of higher intelligence and refinement comes within their reach. It is not respect of persons, it is at the antipodes from sycophancy and snobbishness,—it is simply the like drawing to the like, the magnetism between whatever is brighter and higher in our humanity. So Letty’s friends were often distinguished in one way or another, not by any means always in rank, for she numbered them in the workhouse and the hospital, but they were more or less geniuses in their several orders. One was a poor politician, one a runner after tiny emerald mosses with their brown fairy cups. Letty was taken notice of by no less a person than a clever, managing housekeeper in the family of a wealthy cotton lord; nay, Letty was engaged in marriage to a young man with education enough to be a clerk in the factory where she worked, and not only with such chance advantages in book-keeping, but with that intense love of the beautiful in all its shapes which belongs to some of the tenderest and most dependent of our race. Yet Letty was only the orphan daughter of a mechanic, who had been rather remarkable for his incapacity than for anything else. She must have gone back to some more distant ancestor for her faculties, because Letty was born a rising young woman.
I would like to show you Letty in the physique before she leaves the factory this night, as it happens, never to return. She is not a little sprite of a woman, as it is the fashion of the day to find embodiments of latent power. I suspect the size of the lantern has really nothing to do with the strength of the flame within. Letty was fair and pale—so fair and pale that there would have been something insipid about her person, had it not been thrown into a grand mould. She was a big woman, rendered only slightly ungainly by her compressed drapery. Her face was one of those statuesque faces which are apt to be heavy in repose, but it was an open, noble face, notwithstanding; and when heated and animated it lit up into a positive splendour of beauty, but a beauty more of form and tone than of the clear, cool colour which subdued it, as a painter subdues his brilliance by deep shades and grave backgrounds. It was what some would have called a solemn, cathedral face: yet believe me, when it was blithe, it was with an exuberance and abandonment of gladness, like Rome at the Carnival, and as your stern, good persons laugh, on rare occasions, with a pure sweet passion of laughter.
Above Letty Brown’s loom was the instance of a pleasant fashion, which belongs more to country than to town mills—a bunch of hawthorn, such as those with which old country wives used to fill their grates, was still pearly and almond scented in the dim, loaded air which no ventilators and no open windows could entirely clear. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, Letty’s loom showed such traces. Though she lived in a great town, she was never without her supplies of holly, daffodils, roses, wallflowers. He could not live without such fresheners of his existence, and he lavished them on Letty, who, in her native stateliness and peacefulness, loved them better than she would have done jewels. That night, at the ringing of the factory bell, Letty sorted her loom as she was wont, in her orderly fashion, and went out slowly and singly, lingering behind the riotous troops of her companions, in order to be joined by George Ashe. There he was, by her side, a slight lad, more youthful-looking than Letty, though he was her senior, with that ineffable air of refinement which some people confusedly call a genteel address, and with one of those bright and spiritual faces, set in soft, dark, curly hair, which we are driven to look on in a man with dim doubts and forebodings.
Letty no more dreamt that she would not return to the mill on the morrow than that she would wed George Ashe—an orphan like herself—offhand, without money laid by, taking on their furniture, and launching him at once on a muddy sea of debt. A common measure which Letty, with her abundant sense, held in horror—the more extreme that George did not contemplate it so severely or take steps against it so decisively. He had honest principles but extravagant habits for his station, though they were lovely, lovable habits at the same time, and the two struggled together within the man in equal entanglement and in a kind of drawn hostility.
That very evening—one of the memorable ones in Letty’s life—she went by appointment to see her friend, Mrs. Peaston, whose scullion she had comforted in her visits to the hospital, and whose clothes she had helped to carry from the washerwoman’s when the laundress and the other servants of the great house were busy, and for whom she had procured a sovereign recipe from an amateur chemist for taking iron stains out of linen. At the great house in the suburbs Letty heard that the family were in sharp and sudden distress. One of the sons had been seized with violent illness, and was under active treatment from the doctors, while his relatives and the household generally were struggling more or less with grief and fear. It was not from pure regard to the sufferer—he had been an ill-conditioned lad as ever existed, and cost his kindred sorrow and shame—but they would fain save him from perishing in those pangs of body and mind which were exciting the whole house, and casting down