“Oh, Margaret,” cried her sister, who sat looking at her all the evening as if they had been parted for ten years, “you dreamed that. It was a fancy. Think what a state your poor head was in! It may have a few strange imaginations left in it still. May it not, Edward?”
“This is not one,” he replied. “She heard very accurately.”
“What did they mean?”
“There is a report abroad about me, arising out of the old prejudice about dissection. Some of my neighbours think that dissecting is the employment and the passion of my life, and that I rob the churchyard as often as anybody is buried.”
“Oh, Edward! how frightful! how ridiculous!”
“It is very disagreeable, my dear. I am taunted with this wherever I go.”
“What is to be done?”
“We must wait till the prejudices against me die out: but I see that we shall have to wait some time; for before one suspicion is given up, another rises.”
“Since that unhappy election,” said Hester, sighing. “What a strange thing it is that men like you should be no better treated! Here is Mrs Enderby taken out of your hands, and your neighbours suspecting and slandering you, whose commonest words they are not worthy to repeat.”
“My dear Hester!” said he, in a tone of serious remonstrance. “That is rather a wife-like way of putting the case, to be sure,” said Margaret, smiling: “but, in as far as it is true, the matter surely ceases to be strange. Good men do not come into the world to be what the world calls fortunate, but to be something far better. The best men do not use the means to be rich, to be praised by their neighbours, to be out of the way of trouble; and if they will not use the means, it does not become them—nor their wives—to be discouraged at losing their occupation, or being slandered, or suspected as dangerous people.”