“Rare!” interrupted Kenelm, who was excited to a warmth of passion which would have startled his most intimate friend,-if indeed an intimate friend had ever been vouchsafed to him,--“rare! nay, how common--I don’t say to the extent of forgery and fraud, but to the extent of degradation and ruin--is the greed of a Little More to those who have The Enough! is the discontent with competence, respect, and love, when catching sight of a money-bag! How many well-descended county families, cursed with an heir who is called a clever man of business, have vanished from the soil! A company starts, the clever man joins it one bright day. Pouf! the old estates and the old name are powder. Ascend higher. Take nobles whose ancestral titles ought to be to English ears like the sound of clarions, awakening the most slothful to the scorn of money-bags and the passion for renown. Lo! in that mocking dance of death called the Progress of the Age, one who did not find Enough in a sovereign’s revenue, and seeks The Little More as a gambler on the turf by the advice of blacklegs! Lo! another, with lands wider than his greatest ancestors ever possessed, must still go in for The Little More, adding acre to acre, heaping debt upon debt! Lo! a third, whose name, borne by his ancestors, was once the terror of England’s foes,--the landlord of a hotel! A fourth,--but why go on through the list? Another and another still succeeds; each on the Road to Ruin, each in the Age of Progress. Ah, Miss Travers! in the old time it was through the Temple of Honour that one passed to the Temple of Fortune. In this wise age the process is reversed. But here comes your father.” “A thousand pardons!” said Leopold Travers. “That numskull Mondell kept me so long with his old-fashioned Tory doubts whether liberal politics are favourable to agricultural prospects. But as he owes a round sum to a Whig lawyer I had to talk with his wife, a prudent woman; convinced her that his own agricultural prospects were safest on the Whig side of the question; and, after kissing his baby and shaking his hand, booked his vote for George Belvoir,--a plumper.” “I suppose,” said Kenelm to himself, and with that candour which characterized him whenever he talked to himself, “that Travers has taken the right road to the Temple, not of Honour, but of honours, in every country, ancient or modern, which has adopted the system of popular suffrage.” CHAPTER XVII. THE next day Mrs. Campion and Cecilia were seated under the veranda. They were both ostensibly employed on two several pieces of embroidery, one intended for a screen, the other for a sofa-cushion; but the mind of neither was on her work. MRS. CAMPION.--“Has Mr. Chillingly said when he means to take leave?” CECILIA.--“Not to me. How much my dear father enjoys his conversation!”