In the Mayor's Parlour by J.S. Fletcher

Brent went to bed that night wondering what it was that Queenie Crood wanted. Since their first meeting in the Castle grounds they had met frequently. He was getting interested in Queenie: she developed on acquaintance. Instead of being the meek and mild mouse of Simon Crood's domestic hearth that Brent had fancied her to be on his visit to the Tannery, he was discovering possibilities in her that he had not suspected. She had spirit and imagination and a continually rebellious desire to get out of Simon Crood's cage and spread her wings in flight -- anywhere, so long as Hathelsborough was left behind. She had told Brent plainly that she thought him foolish for buying property in the town; what was there in that rotten old borough, said Queenie, to keep any man of spirit and enterprise there? Brent argued the point in his downright way: it was his job, he conceived, to take up his cousin's work where it had been laid down; he was going to regenerate Hathelsborough.

"And that you'll never do! " affirmed Queenie. "You might as well try to blow up the Castle keep with a halfpenny cracker! Hathelsborough people are like the man in the Bible -- they're joined to their idols. You can try and try, and you'll only break your heart, or your back, in the effort, just as Wallingford would have done. If Wallingford had been a wise man he'd have let Hathelsborough go to the devil in its own way; then he'd have been alive now."