onsidered objectionable; but he silenced this at once as palaver, and
went off to fetch his wife to try her arguments.

This was worse than Phoebe had expected! Cecily was too thorough a wife
not to have adopted all her husband's interests, and had totally
forgotten all the objections current in her own family against the
manufacture of spirits. She knew that great opportunities of gain had
been yielded up, and such improvements made as had converted the
distillery into a model of its kind; she was very proud of it, wished
every one to be happy, and Mervyn to be saved trouble, and thought the
scruples injurious and overstrained. Phoebe would not contest them with
her. What the daughter had learnt by degrees, might not be forced on the
wife; and Phoebe would only protest against trying to shake a fixed
purpose, instead of maintaining its grounds. So Cecily continued
affectionately hurt, and unnecessarily compassionate, showing that a
woman can hardly marry a person of tone inferior to her own without some
deterioration of judgment, beneficial and elevating as her influence may
be in the main.

Poor Cecily! she did the very thing that those acquainted with the ins
and outs of the family had most deprecated! She dragged Robert into the
affair, writing a letter, very pretty in wifely and sisterly goodwill, to
entreat him to take Mr. Randolf in hand, and persuade him of the
desirableness of the spirit manufacture in general, and that of the
Fulmort house in particular.

The letter she received in return was intended to be very kind, but was
severely grave, in simply observing that what he had not thought fit to
do himself, he could not persuade another to do.

Those words somehow acted upon Mervyn as bitter and ungrateful irony; and
working himself up by an account, in his own colouring, of Robert's
behaviour at the time of the foundation of St. Matthew's, he went
thundering off to assure Phoebe that he _must_ take an active partner, at
all events; and that if she and Robert did not look out, he should find a
moneyed man who knew what he was about, would clear off Robert's waste,
and restore the place to what it had once been.

'What is your letter, Phoebe?' he asked, seeing an envelope in Robert's
handwriting on her table.

Phoebe coloured a little. 'He has not said one word to Humfrey,' she
said.

'And what has he said to you? The traitor, insulting me to my wife!'

Phoebe thought for one second, then reso