tell you! She'll be the ruin of the
business, with her fine-lady-airs! Who's she, I should like to know?"

"I shall speak to her," said the husband. "But," he went on, "I fear
you will no longer approve of marrying her to George, if you think
she's an injury to the business!"

"You know, as well as I do, that is the readiest way to get her out of
it. Make her marry George, and she will fall into my hands. If I don't
make her repent her impudence then, you may call me the fool you think
me."

Mary knew well enough what they wanted of her; but of the real cause at
the root of their desire she had no suspicion. Recoiling altogether
from Mr. Turnbull's theories of business, which were in flat
repudiation of the laws of Him who alone understands either man or his
business, she yet had not a doubt of his honesty as the trades and
professions count honesty. Her father had left the money affairs of the
firm to Mr. Turnbull, and she did the same. It was for no other reason
than that her position had become almost intolerable, that she now
began to wonder if she was bound to this mode of life, and whether it
might not be possible to forsake it.

Greed is the soul's thieving; where there is greed, there can not be
honesty. John Turnbull, it is true, was not only proud of his
reputation for honesty, but prided himself on being an honest man; yet
not the less was he dishonest--and that with a dishonesty such as few
of those called thieves have attained to.

Like most of his kind, he had been neither so vulgar nor so dishonest
from the first. In the prime of youth he had had what the people about
him called high notions, and counted quixotic fancies. But it was not
their mockery of his tall talk that turned him aside; opposition
invariably confirmed Turnbull. He had never set his face in the right
direction. The seducing influence lay in himself. It was not the truth
he had loved; it was the show of fine sentiment he had enjoyed. The
distinction of holding loftier opinions than his neighbors was the
ground of his advocacy of them. Something of the beauty of the truth he
must have seen--who does not?--else he could not have been thus moved
at all; but he had never denied himself even a whim for the carrying
out of one of his ideas; he had never set himself to be better; and the
whole mountain-chain, therefore, of his notions sank and sank, until at
length their loftiest peak was the maxim, _Honesty is the best
policy_--a maxim