"Showed his good sense and manliness," said the Doctor gruffly. "I wish every one else had been as wise. I wish all of us had big paying shops at our backs instead of Carey's shaky bank. I for one would swallow the indignity cheerfully. Why, my father kept on his dispensary in the days when the practice was at its best. The greater fool I to give it up. I tell you England will never be what it was till it gets rid of this rubbish of despising trades and shops. Don't you help to put it into these silly girls' heads. It makes me sick to think how they may live to wish they were connected with an honest, solvent shop." "My dear, I think you are going a little too far." Mrs. Millar fired up in defence of her young like a ruffled mother-pigeon. "I should be very sorry to teach the girls to look down on anybody; but that there are different sorts and conditions of men, they may learn from their very Bibles and prayer-books. There are such things as education and culture--not to speak of good birth. You yourself, Dr. Millar, are fairly well born and well connected for a professional man." She instanced this with an imperceptible bridle and toss of her matronly head, which hinted broadly, "If it had not been so, Jonathan, I should never have been Mrs. Millar." The movement threatened to deposit her cap on the carpet behind her, but she recovered it in time, and took up the thread of her discourse by quoting the much-prized family distinction--"There was your Aunt Penny, who married into the county." "Oh! are you at that humbug?" he cried, with a man's disrespectful impatience. "I thought it had seen its day, and was long over and done with. I could not have conceived that you--" ("were such a fool," he was going to say, when he caught himself up.) He was quick-tempered and impulsive, but he was also suave by nature, and his long habit of courteous indulgence to his wife caused him to alter the phrase. "I did not know that you had so lively an imagination as to persist in believing that old myth, Maria." "But your Aunt Penny did marry one of the Beauchamps of Waylands," insisted Mrs. Millar. "Certainly; and she made the poorest marriage of anybody that I have ever had to do with, though I have always understood that he was not a bad sort, beyond being as thick-headed as his brother the squire or an officer of dragoons. He get on at the bar! I dare say not. And he was no quicker-witted or longer-sighted in Australia. You must have heard me say how grieved I was once when I came across a fellow from Sydney who had been up the country, and remembered something of the Beauchamps and their straits. They were regularly hard up, and went through no end of trouble. Poor Aunt Penny seldom had a woman-servant--women-servants were more difficult to get out there in those days. She had to wash, cook, and scour for the men at the station." "Why didn't they come home?" inquired Mrs. Millar rather weakly.