Dorothy Mills

“The boys would quit school and sooner or later go to jail for something silly. I might not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up.””

“Trains passed in the opposite direction, taking back the cotton princes to Tidsley, Elton, Burrows, and further on to Southport, Blackpool, St. Anne's. She could see the occupants of the first-class carriages playing cards, or fallen into unlovely sleep. They did well to avert their eyes from the landscape they had made. They had made it; but they could not, like God, look and see that it was good. Monstrous slag-heaps, like ranges in a burnt-out hell; stretches of waste land rubbed bare to the gritty earth; parallel rows of back-to-back dwellings; great blocks of mill buildings, the chimneys belching smoke as thick and black as eternal night itself; upstanding skeletons of wheels and pulleys. Mills and mines; mills and mines all the way to Manchester, and the brick, the stone, the grass, the very air deadened down to a general drab by the insidious filter of soot.But Jane, Lancashire born and bred, did not find it depressing. It was no feeble, trickling ugliness, but a strong, salient hideousness that was almost exhilarating.””

“What if I stay?” She gaped at him. “What are you saying?” “You heard me. What if I keep the mill? Forget about Texas. Adopt Sophie. What then?” She was stunned. She’d never imagined such devotion even existed. “You love me that much? To give up everything you’ve ever wanted?” “Yes, darlin’. May the saints help me, I do.””