How it opens
You were David Claridge, and the mill fever and the sea had made you an orphan at six, and the Friends of Hamley had divided you between them like a debt.
Your uncle Ivory kept the counting-house of the great mill, and his house kept the testimonies, plainness, silence, and the peace that outlasts armies.
HyldaDavid, they are sending my guardian's cotton questions to you again. You answer lords of trade at nineteen, and cannot ask a girl to walk the moor at twenty-three.
Choose
Ask her to walk the moor, plainly, as a Friend asks anything.
Answer the cotton questions and leave the moor unasked, rank being rank.
Ask her guardian instead, for leave to speak, in the old form, and take the answer like a Friend.