“I have met,” said he, “in my time, nearly all sorts and conditions of people. Indeed, a doctor's life brings him into contact with more maladies of nature and temperament than diseases of material origin; but anything like this woman I never saw before. To begin: she combined within herself two qualities that seem opposed to each other,--a most lavish candor on the score of herself and her family, and an intense distrust of all the rest of mankind. She told me she was a baronet's wife; how she had married him; where they lived; what his estate was worth; how this young fellow had become, by the death of a brother, the heir to the property; and how his father, indignant at his extravagance, had disentailed the estate, to leave it to a younger son if so disposed. She showed at times the very greatest anxiety about her son's state; but at other moments just as intense an eagerness to learn what schemes and intrigues were being formed against him,--who were the people in whose house he then was, what they were, and how he came there. To all my assurances that they were persons in every respect her son's equals, she answered by a toss of the head or a saucy half-laugh. 'Irish?' asked she. 'Yes, Irish.' 'I thought so,' rejoined she; 'I told Sir Hugh I was sure of it, though he said there were English Sewells.' From this instant her distrust broke forth. All Ireland had been in a conspiracy against her family for years. She had a brother, she said it with a shiver of horror, who was cruelly beaten by an attorney in Cork for a little passing pleasantry to the man's sister; he had kissed her, or something of the kind, in a railroad carriage; and her cousin,--poor dear Cornwall is Merivale,--it was in Ireland he found that creature that got the divorce against him two years since. She went on to say that there had been a plot against her son, in the very neighborhood where he now lay ill, only a year ago,--some intrigue to involve him in a marriage, the whole details of which she threatened me with the first time we should be alone. “Though at some moments expressing herself in terms of real affection and anxiety about her poor son, she would suddenly break off to speculate on what might happen from his death. 'You know, doctor, there is only one more boy, and if his life lapsed, Holt and the Holt estate goes to the Carringtons.'” “An odious woman, sir,--a most odious woman; I only wonder why you continued to travel in the same carriage with her.” “My profession teaches great tolerance,” said the doctor, mildly. “Don't call tolerance, sir, what there is a better word for,--subserviency. I am amazed how you endured this woman.”