her Doctor spent a great deal more than his professional income, who
held him up to odium because he played a rubber at whist; and pronounced
him to be a Heathen because he went to the play. In her grief she
besought him to give up the play and the rubber,--indeed they could
scarcely get a table now, so dreadful was the outcry against the
sport,--but the Doctor declared that he would do what he thought right,
and what the great and good George the Third did (whose Chaplain he had
been): and as for giving up whist because those silly folks cried out
against it, he would play dummy to the end of his days with his wife and
Myra, rather than yield to their despicable persecutions.

Of the two families, owners of the Factory (which had spoiled the Brawl
as a trout-stream and brought all the mischief into the town), the
senior partner, Mr. Rolt, went to Ebenezer; the junior, Mr. Barker,
to the New Church. In a word, people quarrelled in this little place
a great deal more than neighbours do in London; and in the Book Club,
which the prudent and conciliating Pendennis had set up, and which ought
to have been a neutral territory, they bickered so much that nobody
scarcely was ever seen in the reading-room, except Smirke, who, though
he kept up a faint amity with the Simcoe faction, had still a taste for
magazines and light worldly literature; and old Glanders, whose white
head and grizzly moustache might be seen at the window; and of course,
little Mrs. Pybus, who looked at everybody's letters as the Post brought
them (for the Clavering Reading-room, as every one knows, used to be
held at Baker's Library, London Street, formerly Hog Lane), and read
every advertisement in the paper.

It may be imagined how great a sensation was created in this amiable
little community when the news reached it of Mr. Pen's love-passages at
Chatteris. It was carried from house to house, and formed the subject of
talk at high-church, low-church, and no-church tables; it was canvassed
by the Misses Finucane and their teachers, and very likely debated by
the young ladies in the dormitories for what we know; Wapshot's big boys
had their version of the story, and eyed Pen curiously as he sate in his
pew at church, or raised the finger of scorn at him as he passed through
Chatteris. They always hated him and called him Lord Pendennis, because
he did not wear corduroys as they did, and rode a horse, and gave
himself the airs of a buck.

And if the trut