‘An excellent manner,’ thought Lady Charlotte, who with all her noisiness, was an extremely shrewd woman, ‘an excellent manner and an unprovoked attack.’ Catherine’s trained eye, however, had detected signs in Robert’s look and bearing which were lost on Lady Charlotte, and which made her look nervously on. As to the rest of the table, they had all fallen to watching the ‘break’ between the new Rector and their host with a good deal of curiosity. The Squire paused a moment before replying. ‘It is not easy to put it tersely,’ he said at last; ‘but I may define it, perhaps, as the mania for mending the roof of your right-hand neighbor with straw torn off the roof of your left-hand neighbor; the custom, in short, of robbing Peter to propitiate Paul.’ ‘Precisely,’ said Mr. Wynnstay, warmly; ‘all the ridiculous Radical nostrums of the last fifty years--you have hit them off exactly. Sometimes you rob more and propitiate less; sometimes you rob less and propitiate more. But the principle is always the same.’ And mindful of all those intolerable evenings, when these same Radical nostrums had been forced down his throat at his own table he threw a pugnacious look at his wife, who smiled back serenely in reply. There is small redress indeed for these things, when out of the common household stock the wife possesses most of the money, and a vast proportion of the brains. ‘And the cynic takes pleasure in observing,’ interrupted the Squire, ‘that the man who effects the change of balance does it in the loftiest manner, and profits in the vulgarest way. Other trades may fail. The agitator is always sure of his market.’ He spoke with a harsh contemptuous insistence which was gradually setting every nerve in Robert’s body tingling. He bent forward again, his long, thin frame and boyish, bright complexioned face making an effective contrast to the Squire’s bronzed and wrinkled squareness. ‘Oh, if you and Mr. Wynnstay are prepared to draw an indictment against your generation and all its works I have no more to say,’ he said, smiling still, though his voice had risen a little in spite of himself. ‘I should be content to withdraw with my Burke into the majority. I imagined your attack on enthusiasm had a narrower scope, but if it is to be made synonymous with social progress I give up. The subject is too big. Only----’ He hesitated. Mr. Wynnstay was studying him with somewhat insolent coolness; Lady Charlotte’s eyeglass never wavered from his face, and he felt through every fibre the tender, timid admonitions of his wife’s eyes. ‘However,’ he went on after an instant, ‘I imagine that we should find it difficult anyhow to discover common ground. I regard your Archbishop’s maxim, Mr. Wendover,’ and his tone quickened and grew louder, ‘as first of all a contradiction in terms; and in the next place, to me, almost all enthusiasms are respectable!’