proval or rejection on the counter: he had already
taken every pains to learn the precise nature of the necessity or
desire; and what he then offered he submitted without comment; if the
thing was not judged satisfactory, he removed it and brought another.
Many did not like this mode of service; they would be helped to buy;
unequal to the task of making up their minds, they welcomed any aid
toward it; and therefore preferred Mr. Turnbull, who gave them every
imaginable and unimaginable assistance, groveling before them like a
man whose many gods came to him one after the other to be worshiped;
while Mr. Marston, the moment the thing he presented was on the
counter, shot straight up like a poplar in a sudden calm, his visage
bearing witness that his thought was already far away--in heavenly
places with his wife, or hovering like a perplexed bee over some
difficult passage in the New Testament; Mary could have told which, for
she knew the meaning of every shadow that passed or lingered on his
countenance.

His partner and his like-minded son despised him, as a matter of
course; his unbusiness-like habits, as they counted them, were the
constantly recurring theme of their scorn; and some of these would
doubtless have brought him the disapprobation of many a business man of
a moral development beyond that of Turnbull; but Mary saw nothing in
them which did not stamp her father the superior of all other men she
knew.

To mention one thing, which may serve as typical of the man: he not
unfrequently sold things under the price marked by his partner. Against
this breach of fealty to the firm Turnbull never ceased to level his
biggest guns of indignation and remonstrance, though always without
effect. He even lowered himself in his own eyes so far as to quote
Scripture like a canting dissenter, and remind his partner of what came
to a house divided against itself. He did not see that the best thing
for some houses must be to come to pieces. "Well, but, Mr. Turnbull, I
thought it was marked too high," was the other's invariable answer.
"William, you are a fool," his partner would rejoin for the hundredth
time. "Will you never understand that, if we get a little more than the
customary profit upon one thing, we get less upon another? You must
make the thing even, or come to the workhouse." Thereto, for the
hundredth time also, William Marston would reply: "That might hold, I
daresay, Mr. Turnbull--I am not sure--if every custome