There would have been plenty of applicants for it, but it had been noised in the town that the Whites had given out that none but people as good as they were themselves would be allowed to rent the house.

This made a mighty stir among the mill operatives and the trades-people, and Stephen got many a sour look and short answer, whose real source he never suspected.
"Ahem! there he goes with his head in the clouds, damn him!" muttered Barker the grocer, one day, as Stephen in a more than ordinarily absent-minded fit had passed Mr.Barker's door without observing that Mr.
Barker stood in it, ready to bow and smile to the whole world.

Mr.
Barker's sister had just married an overseer in the mill; and they had been very anxious to set up housekeeping in the Jacobs house, but had been prevented from applying for it by hearing of Mrs.White's determination to have no mill people under the same roof with herself.
"Mill people, indeed!" exclaimed Jane Barker, when her lover told her, in no very guarded terms, the reason they could not have the house on which she had set her heart.
"Mill people, indeed! I'd like to know if they're not every whit's good's an old shark of a lawyer like Hugh White was! I'll be bound, if poor old granny Jacobs hadn't lost what little wit she ever had, it 'ud be very soon seen whether Madam White's got the right to say who's to come and who's to go in that house.

It's a nasty old yaller shell anyhow, not to say nothin' o' it's bein' haunted, 's like 's not.

But there ain't no other place so handy to the mill for us, an' I guess our money's good ez any lawyer's money, o' the hull on 'em any day.