“I don’t know that that is new, either.” 

 “He began again about your refusal to take Orders, and your going into that dreadful bank instead.” 

 Arthur shrugged his shoulders. “That’s one for you, Clement.” 

 “Oh, that wasn’t the half,” the lady continued, unbending. “He said, there was the living, three hundred and fifty a year, and old Mr. Trubshaw seventy-eight. And he’d have to sell it and put in a stranger and have quarrels about tithes. He stood there with his great stick in his hand and his eyes glaring at me like an angry cat’s, and scolded me till I didn’t know whether I stood on my head or my heels. He wanted to know where you got your low tastes from.” 

 “There you are again, Clement!” 

 “And your wish to go into trade, and I answered him quite sharp that you didn’t get them from me; as for Mr. Bourdillon’s grandfather, who had the plantations in Jamaica, it wasn’t the same at all, as everybody knows and agrees that nothing is genteeler than the West Indies with black men to do the work!” 

 “You confounded him there, mother, I’m sure. But as we have heard something like this before, and Clement is not much interested, if that is all——” 

 “Oh, but it is not all! Very far from it!” Mrs. Bourdillon’s head shook till the lappets swung again. “The worst is to come. He said that we had had the Cottage rent-free for four years—and I’m sure I don’t know who has a better right to it—but that that was while he still hoped that you were going to live like a gentleman, like the Griffins before you—and I am sure the Bourdillons were gentry, or I should have been the last to marry your father! But as you seemed to be set on going your own way and into the bank for good—and I must say I told him it wasn’t any wish of mine and I’d said all I could against it, as you know, and Mr. Clement knows the same—why, it was but right that we should pay rent like other people! And it would be thirty pounds a year from Lady Day!” 

 “The d—d old hunks!” Arthur cried. He had listened unmoved to his mother’s tirade, but this touched him. “Well, he is a curmudgeon! Thirty pounds a year? Well, I’m d—d! And all because I won’t starve as a parson!” 

 But his mother rose in arms at that. “Starve as a parson!” she cried. “Why, I think you are as bad, one as the other. I’m sure your father never starved!” 

 

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