Mr. Wendover made her a little bow.
'I have very little sanguineness of any sort in my composition,' he said drily.
'I should like to know,' said Robert, taking no notice of this by-play; 'I should like to know, Mr. Wendover, leaving the Archbishop out of count, what you understand by this word enthusiasm in this maxim of yours?'
'An excellent manner,' thought Lady Charlotte, who, for 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 neighbour with straw torn off the roof of your left-hand neighbour; 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.'