This was an allusion to Mrs. Iden's grandfather, who had kept a small wayside public. There was no disgrace in it, for he was a very respectable man, and laid the foundation of his family's fortune, but it drove Mrs. Iden into frenzy. "You talk about a quart pot--_you_," she shrieked. "Why, your family have drunk up thousands of pounds--you know they have. Where's the Manor? they swilled it away. Where's Upper Court? they got it down their throats. They built a house to drink in and nothing else. You know they did. You told me yourself. The most disgraceful set of drunkards that ever lived!" "Your family don't drink, then, I suppose?" said Iden. "Your lot's been drinking two hundred years--why, you're always talking about it." "Your family be as nervous as cats--see their hands shake in the morning." "They go to business in the City and do something; they don't mess about planting rubbishing potatoes." Mrs. Iden was London born. "A pretty mess they've made of their business, as shaky as their hands. Fidgetty, miserable, nervous set they be." "They're not stocks and stones like yours, anyhow, as stolid, and slow, and stupid; why, you do nothing but sleep, sleep, sleep, and talk, talk, talk. You've been talking with the lazy lot over at the stile, and you've been talking with that old fool at the back door, and talking with Jack Duck--and that's your second mug! You're descended from a nasty, greasy lardy-cake! There!" Iden snatched a piece of bread from the table and thrust it in one pocket, flung open the oven-door, and put a baked apple in the other pocket, and so marched out to eat what he could in quiet under a tree in the fields. In the oratory of abuse there is no resource so successful as raking up the weaknesses of the opponent's family, especially when the parties are married, for having gossiped with each other for so long in the most confidential manner, they know every foible. How Robert drank, and Tom bet, and Sam swore, and Bill knocked his wife about, and Joseph did as Potiphar's spouse asked him, and why your uncle had to take refuge in Spain; and so on to an indefinite extent, like the multiplication table. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER IX. THIS discordance between her father and mother hurt Amaryllis' affectionate heart exceedingly. It seemed to be always breaking out all the year round.